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The Only Magazine TDevoted to Films
as an fArt

Price I Shilling
ol. V No. I July 1929

London Office :

24 DEVONSHIRE STREET,
W.C.I

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" VARIETES "

Revue ^Nlensuelle Illustree de L'esprit Contemporain
Directeur : P. G. van Hecke
D E U X I E M E A X X E E

{A PARTIR DU 15 MAI 1929)

Da?is chaque iiiimero :
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teurs de premier ordre.

LES CHROXIQUES ET RUBRIQUES :

Pierre MacOrlan Tragedies et divertissements populaires.

Henri Vandeputte Habitudes preferees.

Paul Fierens Des rues et des carrefours (Lettre de Paris).

Denis Marion Le sentiment critique.

Pierre Courthion La boite a surprise (tableau des mcEurs artistiques

contemporaines) .

Andre Delons Le cinema a Paris.

Franz Hellens Chronique des disques.

Xico Rost
Andre de Ridder
P.-G. ran Hecke
Gille Anthelme
Bernard Brunius

Albert Valentin
Sacher Purnal

Chroniques de Berlin
L'anthologie esthetique.
La peinture.
Les sports.

Inventeurs et Inventions.

Le caeur a I'ouvrage.
UX ROMAX DE :
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TRIPES D'OR."

Des lettres inectites de Paul Leautaud d Paul Valery, Rachilde, Kenny de Gourmont, Marie Laurencin,
Marcel Schtvab, Valette, Audre Rouveyre, Appolinaire, etc., etc.

" VARIETES " publishes every month a number of reproductions
from exclusive stills of classic and av ant garde films, with criticisms
by Albert Valentin, Denis ?Jarion and Andre Delons.

Douze numeros du plus modeme, du plus vivant et du plus complet des magazines pour 100
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Editor : K. ]\L\cphersox
Assistant Editor : Bryher
Published by POOL
Riant Chateau * Territet • Switzerland
London Office: 24 Devonshire St., W.C.i

Contents :

As is

The French Cinema , . , .
Scatter Brains .....
Camera Problems ....
The Film in its Relation to the Unconscious
Silhouette of a Critic ....
Some British Film.s ....
Kultur-Film .....

All Talkie

Cinemaphobia .....
Comment and Review

Kenneth Macpherson

H. A. Potamkin

OSWELL BlAKESTON

Carl Hoffmann

I. s.^alschutz
Michael Stuart
Hugh Castle
Winifred Ray
A. W.

Clifford Howard

Paris Correspondents :

London Correspondent :
Hollywood Correspondent
Berlin Correspondent :
Geneva Correspondent :
Moscow Correspo7ide7it :

/ Mark Allegret
\Jeax Lexauer

Robert Iierrixg
: Clifford Howard

A. Kraszxa-Krausz

F. Chev alley

P. Attasheva

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Vol. V No. I July 1929

AS IS

BY THE EDITOR

Nobody would believe, from a scrutiny of film conditions
at this present time, that Close Up could be enjoying yet
another birthday. Yet here we are, unweakened by attrition
or starvation, once more going forth — kind of Zodiacal
Aries — butting with horns, stamping with hooves, lacking
only a dragon's fire to scorch our enemies. This is again
a happy anniversarv, and Aries is growing to a big ram. His
woollv head is wiser and his rounded horns have o'rown hard.

To-day, because it is his birthday, he is sitting quietly,
with his head not far above the earth, not making many signs.
If you are misled into thinking he has eaten too much birth-
day cake, someone — a thought-reader, shall we say — will put
you right for the asking.

His mood is serious, even slightly troubled. He has much
to think about, and few to confide in. For he does not take
such woes as he has outside a limited family group. The
thought-reader will pause here, and ask you if you wish the
divination to continue. Without losing his pensive stare,

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the ram will demur that if he is a little troubled it can be onh
on account of growing pains. And the thought-reader will
continue.

If the ram is not careful he will think himself into a mood
of pessimism. Forsaking momentarily diagnosis, the
thought-reader will philosophise. A doubt is a fecund
breeder. If you are troubled with one, ten minutes' thought
will multiply it to the point w^here you yourself are a point
of negative consciousness, receiving vibrations of defeat, loss
and suffering. The ram replies that his own heavenly sign
know^s no defeat. There is difference, he says, between
doubts. Abstract doubt — the doubt of something you believe
because of will to believe — is different from doubt that is
philosophic, and, in effect, constructive preparation for what
trends the future may assume.

The talking film, says the ram (for it begins from there)
is a parricide. A tinny warrior from the costumier, who,
making martial gestures with his papier-mache sword, steps
clumsily back ten years or more, and is even now marking
time on the trampled body of his parent. He is a Roman
bully, dressed by a wiggery, and his ultimate culture may well
attain a counterfeit of Rome's rank sw^aggering.

* * *

He is, indeed, to his parent what all Rome's clap-trap was
to intellectual Greece. Cymbals, swank, the militant im-
perialism of the screen; for his cultural summit the engaging
pathology of a Caligula. Reflect that with his new^ tin
trumpets, every stroll will be a festival procession, noises lop-
ping down the quiet like earliest branches. Already his

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jurisdiction is noisy like a gong or braying ass in the
vanquished towns. The defeated stand behind windows,
whispering; the pleasant towns are littered with damaged
culture. The half-built houses are deserted. Xo work will
be done on them, and the debris lies on discarded building-
stuff. Xone of the old machines can be heard at work any
more, and there is only watching and fear. The air is full of
the dust of the new jerry-buildings. Adding a voice that
takes away all that people put in for themselves. Expelling
imagination. The personal concept banished. The gesture
that to each meant something that each alone in some way of
his own created and gave to himself, must cede in favor of that
to which a voice can reduce it. The accidental charm beyond
a director's intention, that was imagination caught in some
mesh of recognition or memorv or suggestion or joy, must
go before the incredible half-wit snortings that are supposed
to justify the plaster trees and unspeakable potted foliage of
the studio out-of-doors. We are back with backdrops and
barnstorming.

* * *

So thinks the ram, for he thinks of the present, not (for the
moment) of the future. The waiting, waiting. The weeping
artists starved from their love and their work. These matter.

The back stepping of the tinfoil gladiator may be a
balancing necessity for forward leap. The leap may be long

and clean But certainly longer than clean. And

a long time will have to pass indeed before charlatans, vul-
garians and opportunists are chased from the field. For
the next few years talking films mean rehash. Rehash of
Somerset Maugham, of Frederick Lonsdale, of ]\Iichael

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Arlen, of theatre names we had, not out of reason, expected
to hear no more. Rehash of Madame X, of Stella Dallas,
and the screen's life-sentenced, worst offenders. Rehash of
PauHne Frederick, Nazimova, Mae Murray — of all the stars
that cooled and fell to vaudeville. Somebody's Nemesis !
They trained their talk and rehabilitate themselves with
specially ground, soft-focus lenses, ready to repeat forgotten
triumphs of their prime in 1902 and 1910 and 1880.

The artists wait and wait. World sales, markets, ex-
ploitation, profits, were hedging them in, closing them
round, herding them, reducing and reducing their
opportunity and scope, until, one by one, Sweden, Germany,
France, went deeper and deeper to waste, leaving only
Russia, firm in her beliefs but shaken financially and
sounding the markets of the world for possible sales. The
impregnable Eisenstein going and going to Hollywood.
Pudovkin leading a role in a wholly callow and fatuous

German film. Feelers indications premise.

Quiet erosion everywhere. Then, like a monstrous tidal
bore, the onrush of the talkie. Quiet erosion now a rapid
crash and fall of land. Back ten, back fifteen years. Back
to Sonny Boy and ^lammie ]\Iine and Don't Go Down the
Mine, Daddie. Back to proscenium front. Back un-
ashamedly to Little Dorrit and East Lynne. Back to a
hundred thousand Dancing Daughters, back to the
bootlegger and the thug. Back to Bella Donna and Mary
Dugan. Back to ^Methuselah. Back, in short, to front !

^ ^ ^

And the vanquished, whispering behind windows, say

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among themselves, there is no need for this retrogression,
the manacled, slave-driven genius turns happily to sound,
seeing already beyond the tap of feet outside to counterpoint
view of an empty room, beyond firebells, beyond the dripping
water-tap. Is not the fancy-dress Caesar already using the

lapping of rivers, the soughing of rain ? But the

genius knows there is no place for him yet. Al Jolson has
still to make a greater singing fool of himself. Dolores
Costello has yet to be filtered to something at least as quiet
as a saw-mill. No wonder the genius weeps.

^ *

Then over this sullen sky shone one apocalyptic line of
light. Erno Metzner made Uberfall, and the way of the
genius director was pointed. And, as quickly, the apoca-
lyptic ray was snuffed bv the censor — the one man who
believes that Justice is blind and works accordingly.
Uberfall was a message of hope. A way out, a pass, a
defile. It presented new form for the short film. And, as
yet, there is nothing to be done to the meddlers who have
power to forbid it.

Such are the ram's thoughts on his birthdav. Not gay,
you have seen. A little too discouraged perhaps. But the
thought-reader was wrong about vibrations of defeat, and the
ram is not asking for silent films again, though it looks un-
commonly like it. He is asking for intelligent sound films.
He has seen his friends hurt, and would willingly hasten to
his butting. The year ahead is already licked bv war as a
house bv flames.

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Three plans : —

1. To go on butting the censor. Reform first. AboHtion

when the strength is on our side.

2. International copyright law to protect directors.

3. Abhorrence of half-measures and second best, than

which there is no greater subjugation.

We are not, however, done with our changes. Natural
Vision " — a stereoscopic demonstration, was recently given
by R. C. A. A screen thirty feet high, fifty-two feet long —
an area of 1,560 square feet of glass — showed films made by
the Spoor-Berggren system. Photophone made the noises.
The new camera likes to photograph scenes five miles away.
Everywhere they are making the same claim — that it will do
away with the necessity for close-ups. If this isn't a catch-
phrase it's a menace. Close-ups are rarely explanatory any
more. They are part of (if the overworked word can bear it)
psychology. However, in the near future, Hollywood
directors will no doubt set their cameras on Florida beach
and photograph a film directed by radio in Hongkong. An
expedition through Nicaragua will necessitate no greater
hazard than a ride round the suburbs or a rostrum on the
roof. We shall be able to sit at our desks and photograph
Titicaca and the fauna of Popocatapetl . Eisenstein won't
have to go to Hollywood. He will film it from a window of
the Sovkino Leningrad studios. The close-up will vanish
and the far-off will take its place. In our homes will be
shilling-in-the-slot meters. We will put in our shilling,
take off the receiver, and there in front of us, natural
colored Lilliputians that we can if we want to stroke with

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the hand, will perform for us. We may even be able to keep
them as pets.

It suggests possibilities. A tap of the button in time may
create a footman, a country residence, a well cooked dinner
or a lover. All vanishable at will. The age of the ionised,
electrically induced. Cinemas, with screens all round the
walls, on floor and ceiling. Where the public can take tea
or shake a cocktail with the manifestations of the stars. It

looks like being a world worth living in.

* * *

The ram thanks all who have sent him birthday greeting,
and hopes they will be with him always. He sends greeting
to his friends and will do his best to keep them.

Kenneth Macpherson.

THE FRENCH CINEMA

Jean Lenauer, wTiting in the May Close Up, has said some
true things which, because they are not qualified, are
dangerous. To say, for instance, that to him the French
have no sense of the cinema is no light charge, and, one may
counter with one of two remarks : this is a prejudice and not
a critical judgment, or the question, a sense of what
cinema? For M. Lenauer, like his young French colleagues,
is all for the American cinema. It is true that he charges

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the French directors with apeing the American successes, but
from every indication his cinema-mind has been formed by
the U.S.A. movie. He is in this a European and parti-
cularly a Frenchman, although his nativity is Viennese.
Like the young Frenchmen, he claims the movie as his and
only his, and to have been born before the film or with it — as
in my own case — is to be put beyond the pale. The young
Frenchman delights, in saying the French are without a
cinema-sense. Lenauer has in the May Close-Up only
repeated M. Auriol in transition No. 15, M. Charensol in La
Revue Federaliste of November, 1927, and the first utterer of
this condemnation, the late Louis Delluc. There are a host
of others. In truth, the young Frenchman is developing a
defeatist mind, and Lenauer is throwing on his little pressure.

One of the slogans of the French counter-French critic is
the denial of youth in the French cinema world. Everyone I
have met has complained of this, and Cavalcanti was glad to
have even an inane actress in Captain Fracasse because she
was young. Youth ! Youth ! it is a perennial cry. And
what does it here signify? What does Youth claim in this
instance? That the cinema belongs to it. And how does it
substantiate its claim ? By repeating the attitudes of the
Frenchmen who first began to swear fidelity to the film.
Auriol utters Soupault's adorations of the American action-
film. And everyone of them echoes Canudo. Except that,
typical of youth of all ages, these youngest Frenchmen are
rebelling against the old cinema — of France. The Revolt of
Youth ? Nonsense. The Rebellion of Youth ! Impatience
and arrogance mostly. There is little development here in
France of that salutarv skepticism among intelligent voung

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men which includes in its scrutinies Youth. For Youth is not
a fact, it is a symbol, and that symbol has no reference to the
date of one's birth. It is true that art and youth are related,
but it is not the youth of which Lenauer talks, but youth
which means fervor. Will Lenauer say that the older
Frenchmen whom he condemns are all without fervor? And
am I, are we, to deny sincerity and depth of devotion to the
film to all those who do not love the film in the way Lenaeur
says he loves it? And just how does he love it? Is it a
sign of love to condemn all who challenge the beloved? That
is chivalry in the wrong category. And just when did
Lenauer begin to love the film ? Of course these questions
are not for M. Lenauer himself.* Xor do I ask for an
answer. These questions contain certain implications :

I. The cinema was not born with the motion picture.
It has its origins in the first experiences of mankind, and its
sources are all the manifestations of life.

II. To care for the film onlv mav be a p^ood wav to a
career but it is certainly no assurance that the film will be
enriched. Creation in one art, or activity in one profession,

^ I am not, it is self-evident, directing my words against M. Lenauer.
I am thinking of all the lovers of the cinema who cry their love aloud.
I know too many parallel instances in America to be convinced too
readily by the declaration: I love the cinema." The American
enthusists of 1923 — and now — were superior to the film only a few years
before their discovery of it as " art." Their interest came only as a
consequence of popular enthusiasm, and an urge to be of the time. But
no critical affection is worth anything unless it has grow^n from the
visceral pleasure of childhood. Are the young Frenchmen, and young
Europeans, experiencing a belated childhood? (I dwell upon the Ameri-
can phenomenon in an article, French Opinion and the American Movie,
appearing in Du Cinema) .

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does not, even in this age of specialization, bar one from
another art or another profession.

The cult of youth has produced some interesting conditions
in the French cinema. There is no differentiation here be-
tween the amateur and the professional. And this is bad for
the amateur, the beginner. The group of young men
which includes Auriol and Lenauer will agree that what I say
about the inflation of the amateur is true, but they will not
agree that they are contributing to the very condition they
mock. If there is snobbism in France, and there is, thev are
strengthening it by their attitude, and one of them is youth.
Any number of youngsters (some of older age) put out a film
deriving rudimentarily from Rien que les Heures (without
full awareness of the principle) or Berlin and enter the ranks
of the metteiirs en scene, with the footnote : forgive the trans-
gressions, they are young and they had no money. To
produce a film without money always excites the professional
(or better commercial) world, but it should mean nothing to
the beginner — that's just how he should begin, and moreover,
why should his first work be made public? In America we
distinguish between the amateur and the professional, and
that is the amateur's salvation. It is a part of the discipline
of any artist to "be rejected " or to be ignored — that he
may learn how really insignificant his infant labors are. If
youth is not favoured in the large French companies, its
favor in the specialized halls is certainly less creditable.

If the young Frenchman really cares about the French film,
he will not heed the cry of defeat (which is really a self-
inflation) but w411 examine the French film to learn the French
idiom, which must be his. That the American film, by its

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very remoteness from his own physical experience, enchants
him is not enough reason for him to mistake that enchantment
for the complete and sole experience of cinema. If he really
loves the film, he will not show it by talk upon the influence
of the movie on customs, such as gum-chewing, to which he
is an addict, or physical gestures after James Murray or
George Bancroft. Nor will he show it by damning the
French girl for Joan Crawford or Louise Brooks. Nor by an
ignorance of the past of the American film, which he so much
idolizes. Nor by limiting motion to antic, action, speed.
Nor by finding Victor MacLaglen a great artist, whereas that
lucky Irishman has a constant (hence non-artistic) personality
no matter what the film. Nor by denying the meritorious
Catherine Hessling because she casually recalls Mae Murray.
He will stop chattering and go to vrork. He will discipline
himself and question his enthusiasms, or at least examine
them to know where to put them. AND HE WILL STUDY
THE FRENCH INTELLIGENCE IN ITS EXPRES-
SION IN THE FRENCH FILM, whether he likes its
makers or not. His head is now stuffed with American
idioms, but he will need to be re-born an American before
he will make an integral film of them. The Frenchman
remains a provincial all his life.

To remain a provincial is no limitation to an artist. The
Frenchman's Frenchness has been one of the chief reasons
for his cuhural and aesthetic survival amid influences that
should have long destroyed or reduced him. He creates
within his own boundaries. Nowhere is this condition more
apprehendable than in the cinema. The French mind shows
itself constantly in the success and the failure.

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The French mind is, first, a pictorial mind. The French
cinematist is pictorial-minded. He is not in the least, as is
the American, action-minded. This is as noticeable in the
old serial thrillers, whose idiom is action, as in the absolute
films of the a^'a^t-garde. Nor is the pictorial mind counter-
cinema. Nothing is counter-cinema. And no people are
incapiOjie r>T jiuik'iig fihns. The task is to use the mind where
it can legitimately function. It cannot function in police
films : do not attempt police films. It functions in documen-
taries, films of restricted areas, films psychological and
metaphy sical, etc. : set it to work in these milieus. The
pictorial mind can be set to work badly or well. It is daily per-
ceived in the " grand " French films where it is resultant in a
tedious, over-adorned' spectacle like Koenigsmark . The
pictorial mind does not lend itself very easily to *'* big* " films.
Action alc»ne makes these supportable. That is one reason
w'hv the French cannot compete commercially with America.
But the cinema is not justified bv commerce, no more than
Balzac's right to exist is determined by the public taste for
Dekobra.

The pictorial mind succeeds best when it functions inde-
pendenth" within limited areas. Germaine Dulac does a
fascinating film in TJie Sca-SheJl and the Clergyman and a
charming film in Mme. Btudct, but when she turns to do a
" large-scale " film she puts out the sentimental " poesie "
of The Folly or the Valiant. Poesie " is the pictorial mind
forced to extend itself out of its non-literary milieu. Gance
is full of poesie." He belongs to the France of Rodin, and
with Poirier, to thf France of Lamartine and Hugo without
their vision. The best instance of the pictorial mind rightly

From Leprouse, a film by Usbekgoskino.

Photos : Fama-Film,

From Hands, a new film bv Fama-Film of Berlin, directed by Miklos
Bandy, after an idea by Stella F. Simon, photographed by Leopold
Kutzleb. Music by Marc Blitzstein.

Photos : Fama-Film

Hands has four leading roles, two male and two female as well as
" other hands.'' It is 609 metres in length.

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applied is Jean Epstein. He insists upon the image, lingers
over it, penetrates it. What does it matter that Finis Terrae
is slow? What does it mean that it does not satisfy those
who wanted the subject treated physically m^tesid of
psychically? Epstein has shown how the physical material
may be rendered psychical by persisting in the examination
of the physical image. The pictorial mind here transcends
itself. \ - r .

It is in keeping with the pictorial mind that the French
have made so much of the term " photogenic," that Ger-
maine Dulac indefatigably urges the fthn visuel as against
the film anti-visueL It is right that Man Ray should have
found his centre in Paris, and that the best short, non-
narrative films should come from France : The Octopus of
Jean Painleve as well as that early nature study, The
Germination of Plants, The Zone of Georges Lacombe, La
P'tite Lily of Cavalcanti ...

This leads to a second deduction, the source of the French
film is in the traditional atelier of French art. It is true, in
the main, that the film dependent upon collective labors has
a hard row in France (but, from another point of view, does
it have such a good time in America ?).+ This is not
irremediable. My deduction is not, however, made from
negative conditions but conditions which are organic and
positive. All that I have said before leads to the deduction,

t The collective difficulty in France is mainly the natural indifference
of the French working man, and the financial closeness of the producer.
As for the major collectivity, between the artists, I think, on the whole,
a better esprit exists in France than in America. And as for the intru-
sion of the mercantilists into the enterprise of the author, what grosser
instance than that of Hollywood?

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and the most interesting films are those made from the
atelier y single-artist viewpoint. This does not infer that the
French film must rest in the ateliery as the pictorial mind
does not infer that the French film must remain in the framed
set. Not in the least. The instances of Finis Terrae, En
Rade, Two Timid Souls are sufficient to gainsay such in-
ferences. Yet these films are films with their sources in the
atelier-mind and the pictorial-mind. With Epstein the
atelier becomes the study, for speculation and metaphysics.
En Rade is the pictorial mind providing an enveloping en-
vironment. Two Timid Souls is evidence of the pictorial
mind creating comic rhetoric of the picture. Comedy in
America is action. The gag in Two Timid Souls is a
pictorial gag, in Harold Lloyd it is the antic gag. Chaplin
makes very little of the picture.

The atelier-souvce does not (the word source " is the
explanation) limit the French film to the laboratory where
Jean Lenauer confines it, although the experimental film will
always be a French contribution. Nor does it restrict the
film to its absolute forms. It means simply that the film
companies must recognize the mind of the French artist and
w^ork according to it. The Societe Generale des Films pro-
mised to be just that sort of corporation, allowing the
director, and not the fiscal policy, to set the pace. At present
the Societe Generale seems to be biding its time amid the
confusion caused by the talking picture. But its single-film
policy is the accurate one for the French cinema. For that
cinema, because of the characteristics detectable in it (which
I have considered above) will not be a world's popular
cinema, and no contingement can make it that. In fact, the

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French have not, in their entertainment, the gift of the
popular, whether in the revue, the vaudeville show or the
motion picture.

The French need to be vigilant against two related faults :
sentimentality and refinement. The French sentimentality
is not moral sentimentality, as in the case of the English and
the American, but aesthetic sentimentality. + It is present
in almost every French film, but where it is held within the
boundaries of each instance it aids rather than oppresses the
film. It is sensitivity in The Sea-Shell and the Clergyman of
Germaine Dulac, and in her Cmegraphic Study upon an
Arabesque ; it is sensitivity bordering on collapse in En Rade;
it is sensitivity avoiding collapse by larger references in
Epstein ; it is a diffusive and soft sentimentality in Poirier
and Gance. Leon Poirier has made beautiful documents in
The Black Journey and the second part of Exotic Loves where
the image is the end, but in Verdun and Jocelyn, where the
image refers to its sources in national and literary experience,
he offends with his superfluous stresses of sentiment, and that
is sentimentality, or one form of it. Gance continually
associates his image with some poetic " phrase : Violin
and the lily, Napoleon and the eagle (in Napoleon), the
rose of the rail " (in The Wheel). And both enjoy the sur-
impressed symbol : The wSpirit of France. I have said Gance
was Hugo without Hugo's vision. That makes him the

X A signal instance of refinement applied wrongly is Renoir's The
Little Match-Girl^ where the operetta-Russian Ballet (which is really
French in its mincingness) decorative sense was exercised upon a
Danish folk-theme. Decorative refinement is one of the main obstacles
to the creation of a French cinema comedy.

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counterpart in cinema of Eugene Sue. The French big "
film is eighteenth-century romanticism. In that it is very
much the France of to-day. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century romanticism.

Of this ilk is the recently sponsored humanitarianism of
the French film. Another sentimentalism. For an in-
clusive humanitarianism is not in keeping with the French
temperament of non-projection and dispassion. Therefore
it is frequently false, particularly when uttered by those who
find in the slogan profit. ^I. Tedesco hails the new
humanitarianism " of the American film, finding that
sympathy in films like The Crowd, Lonesome, Undenvorld,
A Girl in Every Port, etc. I shall not here go into any
examination of the American films. But to discover one's
human experience at this level of cinema content, indicates
that the discovery is hardly profound. This acceptance of
American human interest " films as human experience
accords with the frequent French declaration that the movie
is not an art. This is the Frenchman's justification of his
affections. The whole matter of art is resolved in the levels
of experience. The level at which the matter of life is ex-
perienced, determines the category of art or non-art.

The dispassion of the French keeps them, on the whole,
more rational towards the love-life than other peoples.
Therefore the Frenchman who declared against the need for
Freud was not so much in error as Lenauer implies. But
this dispassion does make it difficult for the French to project
themselves into the lives of a less indifferent, more passionate
people. But to say that they never project themselves into
such lives is to forget that the French have been the most

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persistent admirers of the Swedish film, the only fully
realized passionate pictures. Here I think French critical
rationality recognizes the level of tragic experience at which
the Swedes have conceived their films. I do not like the way
in which Sunrise was received by the French multitudes, but
I must admit that the level at which it was conceived, sus-
tained though it was throughout the enfoldment of the
narrative, was a level at which it might just as easily have
been rejected. For the material may have attained to the
tragic, in the German conception it reached only pathos, and
pathos is not far from sentimentality, emotional sentimen-
tality. (I say all this despite my admiration of the film and
its director.) The French reject emotional sentimentality,
but they accept decorative sentimentality.

There have been a few French instances of approximative
tragedy in the cinema, and these few instances indicate a
milieu which the French have not nearly begun to exploit.
I refer at this moment to the domestic tragedy, which provides
immediate activity for all the French qualities of pro-
vincialism, limited locale, pictorial-mind. The film that first
comes to my mind is Poil de Carotte of Julien Duvivier (with
continuity, I am advised, bv Jacques Feyder). The film was
poignant and convincing and in every particular French.
Therese Raquin belongs to the French acceptation, despite
the pronounced German qualities of the exterior lighting and
the acting of the tw-o male players. (Feyder, a Belgian, is
assimilative.) The French, if they but knew, would do the
domestic film. Dulac gave us Mme, Beudet, sensitive in its
irony carried pictorially. Nine years ago Albert Dieudonne
made Une Vie sans Joie (called Backbiters in England) and

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had he ceased where the tale demanded, he would have pre-
sented to a sympathetic audience a tragic idyll. Instead he
continued the film into the episode of the runaway tramway,
where it looked very much like a take-ofif of an old French
tinted film of a locomotive's dash. Jean Benoit-Levy and
Marie Epstein have recently produced Peau de Peche, It is
a melange of many themes expressed in the images and the
captions. But amid this melange one detects certain
promises : in the images of both the city and the country, in
the characterization of the chum of Peach-Skin, and in one
episode which should have been the film. The little stream
which is the sustenance of the neighbourhood runs dry. The
peasants have assembled to hear the radio of one of their
neighbors. While they listen a cry comes from one of the
lads: The river is back!" An old man says: " Of w^hat
importance is the world to us now? We have a river back."
A monumental theme expressed in the area of a small village
in the provinces. A theme that obscures the entire film. A
theme that indicates a possible point toward which the French
film can strive. It is a theme for Jean Epstein.

Jean Epstein is an artist the rest of the French directors
might study with profit. He is, although, I belive, a Jew,
born in Poland, French in his virtues and his faults. His
faults are almost always rendered virtuous by an all-inclusive
mind which is not far removed from French sentimentalism,
but which, by nobler intention and speculation, becomes
mysticism. Epstein deals with inferences, the inferences of
the penetrated image. His film Finis Terrae is, I think, of
highest significance to France. I can indicate some errors,
like the shifting of the point of view from the boys and their

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mothers to the doctor, but they do not contradict the contri-
bution. The film is entirely pictorial-minded. It takes the
natives as it finds them and builds the image of their stolid
movements. I detect in this, not the snobbery Lenauer
finds, but relevant intelligence. However, I do not intend
speaking upon Epstein here. I reserve that for a paper
wholly upon him. I wish only to indicate that here is one
source for the French cinema.

And what will the French film take from Joan of Arc?
It's perfection does not mean that it does not contain the
germ of propagation. It too is built of the image. True it
was done by a Scandinavian. But it was done with French
material and it's method offers an opportunity for the
French intelligence. Another source — and this is one out
of the boundaries of France — is the Swedish film of the days
of Sjostrom and Stiller. The American film, whose
" technique so infatuates the French mind, is not a source
for that mind.

Sources : that is the first investigation every artist should
make. I have dwelt upon the systemic sources for the
French cinema. But, since the cinema, no more than any
other art, is isolated, it will find its sources, not only in itself,
nor in the mind immediately referring to it, but also in the
other aesthetic articulations. Dreyer went to the medieval
French miniature for a source to embolden the imagery, and
hence the drama, of Joan. The French theatre is full of
sources of identical mind with the French cinema mind : take
Gaston Baty's production of Moliere's The Imaginary In-
valid. The pictorial mind dominates. The French cineasie
must cease his absolutes of non-accord between the theatre

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and the cinema. He must look into all his experience and
expressions to discover himself. He must believe he can
create cinema, if he is faithful to his own intelligence, in-
tuition and experience.

H. A. POTAMKIX.

SCATTER BRAINS

Hope alone remaining ! The procession from this year's
box of Pandora is headed by the talkies, the squawkies and
Al Jolson clad in his son's pyjamas.

Enter and exit Mr. Pudovkin, at intervals, followed by
the eyes of press interviewers; while Jannings, tricked out
as a siren on the rocks, tries to attract their attention by
creating records in india-rubber mouths.

Anna May Wong is merely a spectator, standing in a
corner with upraised hands. Buster Keaton throws an
occasional knife in her direction with a certain indifference.

Conspicuous in the chorus of step-dancing daughters is
Joan Crawford (futurist costume), but a determined lady is
attempting to duplicate her " goings-on " ; her dark hair,
flashing eyes and slightly damaged diadem proclaim her to
be Madame Pola Negri.

Hope alone remaining !

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The circus pictures, the peep-behind-the-scenes pictures,
the IT pictures, the cartoon comics. And it is still con-
sidered good showmanship to give the public an eye-full.
There was that multiple exposure in Waterloo^ the exposure
taking the form of a fan, each section containing ranks of
period mercenaries. A good deal of time and care must
have been spent to secure this elaborate Abel Gancism ; I
heard the caustic suggestion that the only way to show such
a shot would be on the ceiling ! And it is still considered
good craftsmanship to move crowds in opposed rhythms.
In the same picture outside files march upwards and inside
files march downwards, and they are all supposed to be
hurrying to the same battle-field !

Ufa, the fairy godmother of the cinema's childhood, who
gave the cradled infant Doctor Caligari, rushed in with the
over-laden Secrets of the East. Therefore to Volkoff the
honour of the worst film to date, although I have no doubt
that his compartriot Tourjanski runs him pretty close with
Volga Volga.

Then the tragedies, and we do have tragedies now-a-days
and that is something. The old type was represented by
Murnau's Four Devils . . . Charles Morton, an exceptionally
handsome hero, falls into bad ways because he has been
associating with the exceptionally unscrupulous vamp. By
trade a trapeze artist, he looses his nerve w^hen aloft ; beads
of sweat on his brow^ catching the light. Trust little Janet
Gaynor to put everything right, even if she has to fall off a
trapeze to win back Charlie for a happy marriage; and now,
although he presumably indulges in the same amount of
petting, he thrives on it; you see, that makes such a very

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good moral ! ... On the other hand Thou Shalt Not was
unforgettable, the most rewarding picture of this July to July
year.

America had plenty of groomed features like Manhattan
Cocktaily with wonderful Lilian Tashman whom many think
to be the best thing that has come out of Hollywood ; and
plenty of poverty stricken affairs like Bringing Up Father.
All the American fan papers have continued to flourish ;
reproductions of Miss Letty Lorne in a few beads and cap-
tions underneath saying that Letty is just a nice, shy.
old-fashioned girl !

I must mention Close Up's efforts to grapple with the
problem of censorship, a problem inevitablv associated w^ith
Von Stroheim, and editing, and re-editing. People
approached me at the Plaza, with mournful faces, and re-
minded me how much had been cut from the Stroheim
masterpiece, and that I really could not, and should not,
judge it in its existing condition. However, I was impressed
by the fragments; by the way, the atmosphere of Vienna
was subtly re-created by a cigar in the lips of powdered-
haired, supercilious Maude George . . . Face half hidden by
military cockade Von Stroheim considers the difficulties of
his position ; sitting upright on a nervous horse is nothing
to the problems of debt that neither father nor mother will
meet. Pushing back his hat — his passion he cannot conceal
by outward dignity of cockade — Mathew Betz is proprieting
to Fay Wray who wants only to see the procession, that is
until she notices Von Stroheim.

Like so many of the good new American pictures (example
The Crowd) the story is subjective. Von's horse knocks

2()

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down the admiring Fay ; follows the pursuit of the girl, a
harpist in a beer garden, by the man who is a prince in the
most conventional circles. The apple blossoms, which will
upset so many, the little Viennese heroine has arranged
around herself. In Paul Leni's The Last Warnings the
grotesque characters were projected from the ominous shadow
background; but in Stroheim's picture the heroine wills the
scenery into being. She is no poet, she cannot conjure up
the maidens of the Blue Danube whom she longs to see, but
she can visualize the obvious apple blossoms.

One of the performances of the year goes to Zazu Pitts,
who as ever manages to carry off the histrionic laurels on being
given the opportunity. She has the tiny part, in the mass-
acred version, as the heiress whom Stroheim will marrv for
her money. She is like a holy candle; a princess with' a
limp. Is it too flippant to say that a holy candle should not
walk ?

In relation to the year's development of colour it is
interesting to record that in the coloured sequence of this
picture the shadows which moulded become just another
colour.

Stroheim produces so few pictures that I am not in a posi-
tion to ignore anything I may be fortunate enough to see.
Month after month Close Up has dealt conscientiously with
the magnificent new Russian films, there is no need in this
short review to repeat; but the importance of The Wedding
March is that so many more people will have a chance to see
it than Alexandra Chochlova's new comedy. Although the
Avenue Pavilion has done its best to make the film life of

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London brighter, and deserves a hand : in spite of Back-
waters, an Asta Xeilsen movie into which the censor insisted
on inserting Freudian compHcations.

My private theory is that the vogue of Von Sternberg is
not unconnected with the resemblance of his name to that of
the master. Highbrows lost their heads about The Case of
Lena Smith; another example of Sternberg's method of
telling a film by titles.

Silhouette of Pudovkin ; the talkies I I heard the famous
bacon sizzling in Old Arizona, and saw Pauline Frederick
holding bits of tulle to her throat to hide whipcord veins while
she ennunciated in On Trial. It is too early vet to know
whether Pudovkin has utilized the true imagerv of sound, that
remains for next year's survey. To quote an interview which
I had with Pabst, and which appeared in The Kinematograph
Weekly : —

" Yesterday we were all travelling in a Blue Train, to-day
we are back in the caravan fighting the Indians. Of course,
the critics grumble ; the talking picture has thrown us back
ten years, but that is exactly what we directors love."

" ^Ir. Pabst is vital enough to take pleasure in fighting the
Indians ; although he holds that for the next decade scientific
inventions will force the pace. The public will be content to
go again and again to the kinema to hear each time an inno-
vation that makes the new picture more perfect than the last.
Still, when the public does crave once more for art, the brains
will be there, because there is money in the talkies/'

Having quickly run through all that I look back and back
and seek for further sub-divisions ; it strikes me that I might
review the year's satires, epics, as well as the spectacles,

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tragedies, talkies and monuments. What of Les Deux
Timides, Les Xouveaux Messieurs? It flashes up that Ep-
stein's lovely Finis Terrae is showing in the tiniest theatre in
Paris ; that Living Image was released over here without any-
body paying the slightest attention to it ; that somebody
ought to tell Mosjoukine not to play in any more pictures
like The Secret Courier; that the Film Society has a lot to
live up to in the coming season.
In fine; that, that, THAT !

OSWELL BlAKESTON.

CAMERA PROBLEMS

By Carl Hoffman

(Photographer of the well-known Ufa-Superfilms
Nibelunge7i, Faicsty etc.)

The problems of the camera are equally the problems of
the entire motion picture. Generally speaking the work of
the camera carries out the pictorial expression of the
dramatist's thoughts. Film is picture. The picture appeals
to the eye. To use a somewhat daring comparison, it could
be said, that the camera must interpret to the eye the words of
the dramatist.

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Despite the vast development which the film industry has
experienced in America, the fact remains, that the develop-
ment of the artistic film-photography originated in
Germany, just as Germany deserves a lion's share of the
credit for raising the artistic level of film production m
general. Assisted by its vast resources, America held the
fortunate position of being able to exploit these advance-
ments in a most splendid manner.

It was a sacred principle in the early days of film-art that
the camera must stand as firmly fixed as the Rock of
Gibraltar. During the past ten years, however, this principle
lost its rigidity more and more, and to-day the camera has
become so moveable that it has almost become difficult to
control her. The camera glides, slides, rises, is suspended,
shifted into all corners and crevices and thus assists and
supports the progress of the play. If a film were photo-
graphed to-day on old principles of photography, the
audience would immediately suspect that an ancient
production was being shown. Despite the unusual
moveability practiced by the camera nowadavs, the last word,
as to the moveability of the camera, has certainlv bv no means
been spoken. I can imagine moveability of the camera be-
coming perfect to such a degree, that the thoughts of the
author are so plainly expressed by photography, that
sub-titles w411 become fully superfluous. It would take me
into too much detail to dwell on this phase at length.

Almost over night the slogan appeared : The silent film is
dead, long live the sound-film I Does this mean that all the
successes scored w^ith the camera during these last twenty

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years are bound to disappear into oblivion ? Shall the
camera again become rigid as in the beginning ? No, and
again, No ! Retrogression must be avoided by all means.
Purpose of the camera must remain centred in the effort to
harmonize the tone and sound expression of the talkie with
the figurative expression. From what has been shown so
far, it is evident that the camera is being caged in a sound-
proof box. Poor camera ! Alas ! No more of your
graceful movements, no more of your happy-go-lucky shifts ?
Are you again condemned to the same bondage and chains
which you commenced breaking ten years ago ?

THE FILM IN ITS RELATION TO
THE UNCONSCIOUS

I am going to treat the Film from the standpoint of the
Freudian Psychic Life. The other standpoint, namicly that
of the conscious perceptual reality, has resulted in the
Optophonic Cinema.

Night dreams, day dreams, fantasies, delirium, are accor-
ding to Freud direct manifestations of the Unconscious.

With these I class the direct visually-excited mass fantasy
of the Cinema.

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When an audience weeps, that is mass-fantasy affecting
the lacrymal glands causing tears. When an audience feels
Fear, that is mass-fantasy affecting another set of glands
causing the feeling of fright. Intellectual processes are only
partially present.

Let us examine the Dream ; see if we can really apply its
mechanisms to support our theory of the Relation of the Film
to the Unconscious. Maybe we shall discover something
new.

What gives the Dream it's content, shape, and expression
is a conflict between primitive psychic wishes and the
sublimated (disguised) impulses. In Dream-making proper,
intellectual processes are non-existent, whereas in the Fan-
tasy, Reverie, and the Day-dream, there is a definite content
of intellectual conflict with the emergent (censored)
unconscious. This applies to the Cinema in so far as it is
considered purely as a mass fantasy, but the whole question
is one of degree.

The triteness of our phrases requires a certain amount of
qualification before we may proceed.

The film is a visual reality . . . light patterns on a screen.
But the content of the cinema is fantasy.

We know w^ell that there is no need to feel sorry for the
Hall Porter in The Last Laugh ... no need to let tears of
the sublimest emotion well into our eyes when the unearthly
purity of the blind girl (who we know is not blind) threatens
to be defiled, in Jeanne Ney. At some time or other I have
repressed sorrow and tears. Pabst who understands me and
you, brings them to the surface in association with the
creatures of his own conception, to give me, strangely

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enough, intense joy. Pabst transforms and transmutes my
complexes at will, but always into something of great beauty.

Firstly, we will speak of the " content " of the film. This
I liken to the " Manifest Content " or " Dream-Xarrative "
of the Dream (in its wider inclusive sense).

The visual, perceptual film-narrative, obviously resides
totally in the conscious ego . . . only to be forgotten slowly.

But manifest content is not the major importance of the

avant garde " cinema. And our theory helps us in deter-
mining what is this major importance, and in what manner. . .
by what mechanism, is it to be achieved.

We turn then to the Latent Content " . . .to something
which I hold is entirely a function of the Unconscious and
Pre-conscious.

There is none of this mechanism of the psychic processes
about which we speak, without these two parts : manifest
content and latent content, and their inter-relation. So the
name of this article The Film in Relation to the Uncon-
scious " springs from this consideration.

Three very important psycho-mechanisms are "Condensa-
tion " Displacement ", and " Dramatization . . . the
same three mentioned by Freud as Dreami-mechanisms.

" Condensation " is a term applied to the process whereby
various elements in the latent content become fused together
in the manifest content, and finds its parallel in the "mix
" composite-shot ", and sometimes in the " dissolve " of the
cinema.

The separate latent thoughts of the mix " are sorted out
by the unconscious (not without further complexities, let it

c 33

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be mentioned) and retained as associated \ et distinct entitie>.
Only in the manifest content is there mixture.

I suggest that a " mix of the more directly associative
elements of parallel-action is superior to rapid cutting, in that
an inherent disjointedness of the latter method is avoided,
and provided other features are carefully directed, the

condensation " may be of extra value as a psychological
means of creating an associative tension between the separate
thought-entities, far surpassing even the Russian method.

Again in the composite-shot " I see a mechanism of ab-
straction that centres perhaps four or five disfinct trains of
thought, which run their course in the pre-conscious, into
one manifest condensation in the conscious. At the same
time a valuable associative complex is set up in the
unconscious which can be utilised later to telling effect in the
narrative.

The " dissolve " is generally badlv used. A momentary
condensation of a train of thought which has served its
purpose with another which has not yet begun its purpose,
is something which requires careful handling.

Generally it is used, this so called lap dissolve to
associate the old with the new shot, and is in a narrow sense
succesful in this aim. At best elementary, there is a better
use.

The material in the finished train of thought (a) should be
condensed momentarily with the raw visual (manifest)
material in (b) for the sole purpose of associating the latent
content of (a) with the manifest content of (b). This (b) has
as yet no latent content. Therefore, the dissolve should be
used purely as an associative technique connecting the latent

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content of narrative-reality with the symbolism of visual
" imagery ".

I prefer a technique more innately fluid for the purpose of
purely narrative fluidity, and suggest the quick de-focus-cut-
re-focus, which I have seen only once or twice, and then
badlv applied. There is no condensation and defective in-
tention is avoided.

There has been much spoken about " imagery and for
me it is nothing more or less than symbolism It
depends on the intellectual elevation of the composer
whether it be subtle or merely obvious symbolism. ]\Ioney-
lenders always have been and always will be fat spiders to
American Cinema, but occasionallv a Seastrom gives us
symboHsm of the subtle kind seen in Wind,

Presently we shall consider this subject in its fuller aspect,
that of the sublimation of unconscious material . . . the

raison d'etre " of all symboHsm.

Displacement '\ the second mechanism, is an agent
whereby psychic importance is shifted from a given element
in the latent content, to another unrelated element in the
manifest content. This seems to be bound up with " camera
angle " and its purpose.

A film with a theme of thwarted love for its latent content,
rises to a physical climax. In itself the mianifest phvsical
climax is not over impressive . . . but added psychic tension
is brought to bear upon it by displacem.ent from thwarted
love Exactly how to induce " displacement " we shall
touch upon later in connection with Manifest Repression ".

The third mechanism known as " Dramatization " is
simipie, and of greatest imjportance.

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The visual form, a scene of action, time sequence, etc., are
given to the elements of the latent content.

We have met this before under the name of "literalness
It was employed in The Street. The wayward clerk sees
his wife's image going away from him . . . as he looks at his
wedding ring before staking it in the gambling hall.

Symbolism? No . . . for no symbol was employed.
Therefore, not " imagery " either. This visualisation was a
literal translation of the latent content . . . his wife would be
separated further and further away from him. An abstract
mental process converted into its primary perceptions. Such
indeed, is the definition of " Dramatization " in the Freudian
sense.

In general, of course, manifest content is a dramatization
of the latent content . . . but not invariably.

Where is the direct " dramatization " of latent content in
a sequence heavily charged with dramatic irony ? The irony
arises from the fact of that complete variance or absence of
dramatization between latent and manifest content. This
point has probably never been stated in psychological terms
before.

Every abstract mental process is capable of a purely visual
Dramatization. Of any associated ideas connected with the
essential latent thoughts, such ones that will permit of
visual representation are preferred. This is definite . . .
psychologically innate in man.

Therefore I contend that silent cinema is hampered in no
way, and will remain superior to optophonic cinema.

The mind prefers a visualisation to anything else. Even
if the latent thought is inflexible, the mechanisms we have

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reviewed are sufficient to recast it into another if more unusual
visual form. When successfully recast and treated more un-
usually the work is called advanced art

The sound element will rob the film of much of its fantasy,
its mechanisms will be rendered almost meaningless, and
therefore, its psychological appeal will dwindle.

En passant, I do not think there is any meaning in
counterpoint " in connection with fantasy . . . but will not
say definitely.

Before passing on to a discussion of Repression in the
cinematic sense, we may first liken the film generally to the
dream process called Regression. The dreamer is usually
looking on at the dream enactments as a spectator surveys the
stage "... this is called Regression by Freud, we call it
cinema. And the more careful use of dream-mechanism will
produce the more perfect cinema.

Regression will cease when the camera acquires a per-
sonality.

" Cinematic Repression " is of the kind seen in Uberfall.
The footpad's blow is vividly hinted . . . it is not seen . . .
therefore, latent content is hightened by the Repression of
certain manifest elements (their absence).

If the blow were to be manifest, the latent content would
be resolved, there would be no Repression of a brutal thought
and it would suffer from lack of psychic tension.

Displacement " may be induced by means of deliberate
repressions of this kind. Very often the psychic tension may
be usefully transferred (displaced) to the symbols employed.
Again : Seastrom . . . who generally transfers to some
natural force which was a subtle svmbol all the time.

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It was hoped that this theory of Cinema would serve as a
lead and a Statement to a New English Cinema . . . one with
courage in its conviction that " talkies " shall find no place
in its heart . . . and moreover one with a purpose.

This brings me to Purpose. Viewed in the light which it
is hoped has been cast upon it, its Purpose appears to be the
Sublimation and De-sublimation of certain mass repressions,
and complexes wiiich may go to isolate the Englishman from
the world.

Certainly the only instrument capable of such a forlorn
task, is the instrument of mass fantasy . . . the Cinema.

L. Saalschutz.

SILHOUETTE OF A CRITIC

The collected w^orks of John T. Rollstone consist of a single
article on the cinema, published not so many years ago in the
now defunct Screen Success ". Faithful readers of this
kind of literature may remember the sensation caused in its
day by the article which the author modestly entitled " A
Thought About The Movies ". In a prefatory note the
editor of the publication himself takes pains to laud this bit
of philosophy which sets us right about the important thing
in the motion-picture world ". Another equally competent
writer on RoUstone's chef d'oeuvre described it in the telling

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language of American colloquial as " a mouthful The
article in toto has been reprinted in the foremost cinema
revues of America, and its author praised as " perhaps the
most intelligent writer on the subject

To rescue this delicious morsel of criticism from oblivion
for the sake of its savoury wisdom, if not for its timeliness,
would be service enough to a worthy cause. Add to this fact
the rarer and subtler element of literary quality, sustained,
terse and brilliant, creating the impression that here at last
has been set down by a successful disciple of French masters
of epigram, a truth, a dogma, call it what you will, and the
case of an important contribution to the understanding of
the subject is proved beyond doubt.

Perhaps the fragmentary nature of the work is the chief
cause of timidity on the part of critics and reviewers who are
too busy reading one another's opinions to give attention to
an exotic piece of writing scarcely a page in length. Only a
short while ago a magazine devoted to the publication of
w^orks of modern tendencies printed a poem of one line. This
solitary line graces an entire sheet of the magazine just men-
tioned : —

" Don't discuss life, people, problems. Don't voice
poverty."

After giving a sketch of the poetess's life, the editor com-
ments wisely : ''Her writings are brief and uncompromising,
with brusque staccato rhythms and acid philosophical con-
tent." Although we can but disagree with the editor, that the
quoted "poem" has any recognizable rhythm whatever or
any content fit to be described as either ''acid" or "philoso-
phical ", nevertheless, his courage in " voicing " the

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poem " is a matter of note. We are evidently entering the
era of brevity in the arts. The music-halls of Paris with
their fig-leaf attire are pointing the way. Poetry writing will
become a popular pastime when poems need be no longer
than the one " voiced above. In the future, a mere word
may suffice . . . First, poems, then short stories, novels
perhaps, may follow suit . . . Happy prospects, indeed . . .

Of John T. Rollstone's preparation for the task of film-
criticism we can but guess imperfectly. The vast range of
classic plays from Euripides down to Shaw read, analysed
and classified, the canons of dramatic criticism firmly in his
mind, the technique of the new drama-form too on his finger-
tips, as it were, our future film-critic, we surmise, approached
his new field of activity with the confident assurance of a
master. What Rabelaisian wit he would have displayed in
writing of Buster Keaton and his cow ! With what
Heinesque whip of sarcasm he would have flayed certain
''movie" directors! What praise, too, tempered by a
knowledge of the humanly-attainable he would have bestowed
upon patient merit which in the cinema, as elsewhere, from
the unworthy spurns takes ! Unlike some of his professional
colleagues who, with no more than a stock of technical terms
of the cinema and a hazy knowledge of anything, rush into
print, Rollstone, it is certain, would have preferred the
thornier path ...

As for the man's life-story, we must leave a discussion of
it to a more informed pen. Whether, indeed, he is resting
upon the laurels of his initial success or whether some mis-
chance cut off his promising life at the bud, we have no means
of knowing. A grateful posterity will, we doubt not, inscribe

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upon John T. Rollstone's monument the words which
constitute his chef d'oeuvre on the cinema, his life-work, his
all-in-all. It is reprinted here in full that, as the saying goes,
they who run may read : — " Never mind the highbrow stuff !
Give them beautiful girls and handsome men and watch the
cash-receipts swell ! "

Michael Stuart.

SOME BRITISH FILMS

Some films are born inane, others achieve insanity, and
some have profanity thrust upon them. Let us consider
awhile. And live in hope. An Empire's strength lies in its
recruiting posters. And a country's films in their criticism.

Criticism in itself, is, of course, a strange word in England.
Read the Sunday newspapers, the film features of which are
usually written by enterprising residents of the outer
suburbs, with mentalities suited to their environment. Read
their verdicts and ponder them carefully. Then invert the
result and stay away from the picture.

Our pet critics have forgotten most of their adjectives.

Masterful " is on the files, to be resurrected when Alfred
Hitchcock's next opus is flung on the exhibitors and the
Press at its trade show, " Sincere " awaits Captain

41.

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Banlield's next epic, " Lewd must be kept in quarantine
until a Russian film staggers the Film Society, " Revolu-
tionary " must be banished until Pudovkin revisits the
British Isles.

Yes, our critics have had a poor time lately. Their
superlatives are in dry dock, awaiting the next batch of
Elstree trade shows, the pretty little phrases with which they
dismiss Messrs. Cavalcanti and Company must lie dormant
until next season.

With one or tw^o exceptions, we have not had manv
British trade shows lately. The home product is feeling
unwell. Rumour has it that it is busy finding its voice.
One can but hope that it will die dumb. I sometimes
wonder what the critics do when they have no British films
to praise. Probably they begin making puns about Clara
Bow. It's a life.

As a warning to those of Close Up's readers who are suf-
ficiently lucky never to have seen any British efforts, I have
taken seven monumental examples of our screen art and
intend to review their salient features.

Chosen as fairly as possible, I really think they represent
the various currents in the British School, if any or there-
abouts. The discerning reader will then be able to judge
that w^hile we may be excellent fellows when it comes to
growing broccoli and exporting it to France, as film makers
we are scarcely as distinguished.

On the other hand, one would be a fool to condemn British
production out of hand. Our stuff is getting better. There
is no doubt about that. It may still be imitation American,
but it is better imitation than it once was. And in the case

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of one company — British Instructional — it promises to be-
come miicli more than that.

THE LOST PATROL.

A British Instructional film made by Walter Summers.

Patrol got me. I saw it three times. First by business,
then by choice, then by accident. And the third state of
mind was as good as the first. Patrol is a typical British
picture, indirectly glorifying the British soldier. But not so
vicious, needless to say, as The Flag Lieutenant and similar
dither.

Patrol is a satisfying picture. It is almost a great one.
Many people might think that it is the best thing yet done in
England. Summers is one of our best directors. I saw the
film before I had read the book, and, after reading it, can
understand why people who had read the novel first were
disappointed in the picture. It just misses the bigness it
sets out to capture. But in its very failure it is infinitely
more stimulating than the cabaret nonsense of the average
British masterpiece.

The storv is well known ; a dozen men are lost in the desert
during the War. One by way they are killed off like flies,
ruthlessly, unfeelingly, by the vigilant tribesmen. The
sergeant, the one soldier who takes militarism seriously, lasts
longest. He is killed, after having accounted for one Arab
for everv one of his comrades who has been shot.

The picture's value is psychological rather than cinematic.
Summers is nearly always an onlooker in his pictures. But
he is an intensely observant one. He treats his subject
with aloofness, running back from it to give you a sense of

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the pettiness of the whole tragedy against the background of
war, then darting into it again to show how a demented
sergeant will die, starved, parched and maddened, after
cleaning his buttons as though awaiting a battalion parade.

The men are shown first in private life, then drawn to-
gether, and flung into the war drama, sent, gradually
dwindling, to the oasis where the climax is reached. Through
it all we see the civilians lurking beneath the tunics of the
B.E.F. soldier. The jam of futility has been smeared
liberally over the w^hole picture.

Technically, it is not so good. The flashbacks take up too
much footage ; the half reel devoted to amorous adventures
in Venice took our minds off the real drama. Another flash-
back, showing the events which led up to one of the unit
enlisting, was as sickly as treacle with its cheap patriotism
and sentimentality.

One has to forgive much. One comes to forget the
blemishes. Instead, the memory of Clifford MacLagen as
the Sergeant lingers. Not, I repeat, a great film. But very
nearly.

WEEK-END WIVES.

A British International Picture, directed by Harry
Lachman.

Britain's biggest bow at the boudoir box-office. Pulsing
with the palpitating passion of Paramount pulchritude.
Dazzling with the dubious delights of daring Deauville.

Type : bedroom farce. Vintage : French stage. Cellar :
Metro-Goldwyn. Art director : the same. Titles by Double

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entente. Situations, by Naughtiness, out of " A " Certi-
ficiate. Direction, production, and camerawork, slick.

Entertainment values : For the Provinces, who like their
weekly dose of two-dimensional negligee, tremendous. For
the towns, who appreciate American films, considerable. For
the sophisticated, who know all about this sort of thing, fair.
For the film student, none.

Lachman has potentialities. Even in this film, which
possibly justifies its claim to Yankee slickness, he shows a
neat sense of camera. But he ought to be given better
material. As it is he merely left us in about the same state
as Greta Garbo now leaves us, namely, a little less than
frigid.

But then he set out to provide the masses with entertain-
ment.

PICCADILLY,

A British International Picture, directed by E. A. Dupont.

This is the perfect British film. That means to say it was
made by a German, with a German cameraman; its leading-
lady is an American of Polish extraction and its second lady
an American of Chinese extraction ; the leading man is
English and the second man Chinese ; the art direction is by
a foreigner and the story is by Arnold Bennett, who must
have had the toothache or an Income Tax paper at the time.

For the remainder, it is authentically rumoured that the
great aunt of one of the men who trimmed the lights came
from Aberdeen.

So you see, a typical British film.

And what a film! Take a magazine. Open it. Notice

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the stories, illustrated here and there by pretty pictures.
That's Piccadilly. It must have something like a record
number of captions. But it is Art.
ART.

With a capital A. If Dupont wants to show two people
in different rooms he pans from the attic, down the stairs,
across the front room, through a brick wall or two, into the
room, wanders around it and finally brings his camera to
rest on his second character.

Piccadilly is Werner Brandes, the cameraman, first and
foremost. His stuff has quality, the hard American, Para-
mount stuff. And here and there a lot of soft close-ups to
give the art illusion.

And after Brandes ? Anna May Wong, w^ho shakes a
wicked hip through most of the picture. The film, besides
its captions, must contain more close-ups of legs, knees, and
the like than almost any other film.

There must be something wrong somewhere. Piccadilly
was lavishly praised by the critics. The public looked as
though they paid money to see it. I thought it was one of
the world's worst. Especially considering its cost. Atkin-
son described it as a masterpiece. There must be something
wrong somewhere. And I have a feeling it isn't me.

The story deals with a restaurant owner who employs a
star dancer who is his mistress. He becomes intrigued by a
Chinese girl in the kitchens and gives her a part in the
cabaret. Her best boy plays the organ while she twiddles a
sinuous loincloth. Or something like that. Pseudo-Freudian
stuff all through.

Somebody murders someone else, and the Chinese youth —

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quite a fine performance, by the way — dies on Anna's coffin.
Placards outside the London Pavilion announce the fact that
the world goes on. Sardonic, that.

Personally, I wondered it had the cheek to.

BLACK WATERS,

A British and Dominions production, made in Hollywood,
with a British director and cast. A " talkie " picture. A
British Quota "film.

Our first talkie. Chaucer was a much more satisfactory
pioneer. Black TFaf^r^ is a splendid film. It must be. The
Press said so. If this is an example of the sort of talkie we
are going to make, I hereby hope that all the recording sets
get measles. This one sounded as though it had, by the way.

Real drama, though. Murders, shreiks, panels opening,
doors closing. Fog. Fog. More fog. Black, oily waters,
gloomy depths. Fog. Did I remember to say Fog?

A number of people turn up on a dirty ship at midnight
on a dirty night, to answer the dirty call of a dirty criminal.
Evening dress is Dockland. Shiplights winking on sparkling
dress-fronts. Marv Brian, oozing chiffon and sex appeal,
tripping it lightly over the various dead bodies.

There is a mystery. I agree. The mystery, according
to the criticisms, was — Who was the criminal ? Personally,
I thought it was — Where was the film ?

All very sinister. A Lascar blew poison through a blow^-
pipe, an old salt muttered startling things through black
teeth, and someone or other spouted religious tags all over
the sound groove.

The direction was masterful. John Loder ran up and

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down looking for the criminal, ]\Iary Brian ran up and down
looking for John Loder, someone else ran up and down
looking for Mary Brian. At any moment I expected a
skeleton would jump out of a concealed cupboard.

It may have done. I remembered an appointment after
three-quarters of an hour of it. But I am still laying even
money that I spotted the criminal in the first reel. One
always does. These things are so subtle.

WHEN KNIGHTS WERE BOLD,

Produced by British and Dominions, directed by Tim
Whelan.

Suggested alternative title : When Gags Were Old. An-
other of the world's worst. Even for England. I saw this
picture a few days after my second visit to Week-End Wives.
The contrast w^as a compliment to British International.

Fantasy is one of the doors to cinema. This film, the
story is too well known to be repeated, should be sheer
fantasy. And it was. Fantastic fantasy. The picture, as
a comedy, is about as cheerless as a carbuncle. And about
as inflated. The gags are priceless. Too low to be
purchased. Smelly breath and slipperv banisters supply
their quota. I got two titters all through it. It is too slow
to be slapstick, too clumsy to be fantasy. Just idiocy.

The siege of the family castle was made on ambitious lines
with car tracks running along the medieval roads. But the
siege, like the rest of the film, was a rocket which has been
waterlogged for a week.

Nelson Keys, who might be a good film droll if only he
had the material, is like a salmon in a tin can here. Some

The making of The Ghn.t That Wv.r Returns, Alexander
now completed picture.

A scene from The Ghost That Xever Returns.

From Pits, Room's previous film. Production Sovkino. Artists
A. ]^Iinin and Olgina.

Photo : Eli Lotar

A. Cavalcanti and Catherine Hessling, who plays the principal
role in his new film, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.

C: . _ ^ ^ - j.st.' nuniui-r liir^-.j. T lit Lady of the Lake,

a Liamsburougli tilni. Xole subtle poise of lady under tree. Any-
thing might have happened. Note also that Jaeger worsteds were
worn with nineteenth century kilts and modern haircuts. The
charade troubadour is Percv Marmont.

Pass along to the next case please. Gaumont's pas'oral i
piece, The Arcadians. ..." Words, idle words, I know not what
they mean. . .

"We find such realism a little unpleasant." 'More Gainsborough.
The Wrecker. Note the draped figures. The lady emerging as fiom
her limousine, the figure next door coming out of the window
upside down, and tne figure next door about to climb over the

roof.

Our idea of the artistic. Exquisite grouping, and expression of
hngering agony of the faces of the leading players. ..." Ain't
that ART?".,. Paradise, a Denison Clift British Inter-
national film.

The Devil Monkey of the Amazon. From Monkeys' Aloon, a film
now nearing completion by Kenneth Macpherson.

The Douracouli, or Devil IMonkey as he is called by the Amazonian
Indians, is nocturnal in his habits. The two monkeys in this film
are pets of the director.

Sister", who adored being taken in lingering close-ups. One
of Nature's film-stars. The faces are white and black, the back
grey, and the breast orange.

" Sister " (right) and Bill, who hated the camera as much as she
loved it. From Monkey's Moon, a new film by Kenneth Mac-

pherson.

From Foothills.

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fifms are born to be remembered. Others are better unborn.
This is one of them.

MASTER AND MAN.

Produced by British Screen Productions, directed by
George Cooper.

Really British. Another endurance test. The trouble
with this one, despite its hopelessness, is that it might have
been a good film. It has touches. It was probably cut to
pieces, in the wrong places, after the approved English style.
The scene of the rats scuttling out of a burning building is
quite good for a British film.

It almost defies constructive criticism. Technique,
mounting, titling and editing are awful. Direction cannot
be criticised. I should like to know how much to debit to
the megaphone and how much to the scissors. Story con-
cerns a selfish employer who sacks his manager. Their
respective girl and boy have been secretly married. There
is a fire and a case of loss of memory ; a wondering son and
a divided household; a girl reading Hints to Young
Mothers," or something equally suggestive. A tactful lot,
these British directors. It is all very complicated, though it
might have been worth while, and one realises, on seeing it,
how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, seem to be all the
products of the British cinema.

THE RISING GENERATION.

A W.P. Production, directed by Harley Knoles and
George Dewhurst.

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There is an inside story about the production of this film.
But there is no need to sling mud by spilling it. Nice and
mixed that. It suffices to say that it gets near rock bottom.
The biggest moment occurs during a cabaret scene, when
we are edified by a burlesque turn by two professional
dancers.

That is sufficient for the picture. If a film's highlight
consists of a variety turn imported from the vaudeville stage
you can guess the rest. The story of the play, dealing with
a husband and wife who return from abroad and masquerade
as butler and housekeeper to their own children, is sketchily
drawn along impossible lines. Little effort at light relief,
and the film should have been a comedy, is permitted the
artistes. A fake cinema show in the middle of the picture
got a laugh at the trade show. Probably because the
audience wanted to justify their boiled shirts.

George Dewhurst, who cut this epic, must have had the
Devil's own time with it. That he got some sort of cohesion
is a tribute to his ingenuity.

You should see this film. It will be an experience.

^ ^ ^

There are the seven. Optimistic little nigger boys, not
too clean, not too bright. Most of them decidedly back-
ward. But all the apple of their makers' eyes.

We have made one or two films besides The Lost Patrol
which are worthy of serious thought from the artistic angle.
Tesha was good drama. But bad cinema. But seven ex-
amples, as everyone will agree, are perhaps seven more than
enough.

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The thing to remember, all said and done, is that we are
in a blind alley. We don't know which way to turn. When
we do we may make good pictures. Meanwhile, let us
watch — and pray.

Hugh Castle.

KULTUR-FILM

KULTUR-FILM.

The Sciextific-Educatioxal Film.

Published by Tea-Kino-Pechat, ^Moscow.

(Contents : Introduction by K. I. Shutko ; The Physiological
Foundations of Cinematography, by P. P. Lazaref;
What is meant by the Politico-Educational Film, by K.
I. Shutko; The Scientific Film Abroad, by K. L Shutko;
The Scientific Educational Film in the U ,S ,S ,R,, by L.
M. Sukharevsky; On the Way to the Creation of the
Scientific Educational Film, by L. M. Sukharevsky;
Method of Constriicting the Scientific Popular Film, by
A. N. Tiagay; Method of Sho'iinng the Scientific Educa-
tional Film, by L. M. Sukharevsky ; What is meant by a
Chronicle Film, by K. L Shutko; Problem of
preparing a Foundational Staff of Workers for the

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Scientific Educational Film, by L. ^I. Sukharevsky;
Special Devices in Cinematography , by Y. K. Ulovitch ;
Immediate Tasks and Prospects of the Scientific Educa-
tional Film in the U.SS.R., by L. M. Sukharevsky.)

At the first Party Congress held in Russia on questions
connected with the Cinema, a resolution was passed to the
effect that : " The cinema can and must occupy an important
place in the cukural revolution as an instrument of general
education and of communist propaganda " ; and any one who
wishes to be informed as to the means which have been taken
in Russia to put this resolution into practice will find this
volume a mine of information. In spite of everv kind of
financial and technical difficulty, Russia has tackled her film
problems with a zeal and intelligence infinitely worthy of
admiration and emulation. The pioneer enterprise connected
with the cultural film in Russia was the Gos-Kino, which in
1923 formed a special department for developing this side of
its work. In conjunction with Kult-Kino, with which it
afterwards became amalgamated, this department produced
the famous film, Abort (abortion). Kult-Kino also produced
The Truth of Life (syphilis). Life as it is (tuberculosis), as
well as a number of ethnographical, geographical and other
films. Among other organisations which have produced
educational film.s are : Politkino (Electrification, The Black
Death, The Great Flight, etc.): Sevzapkino (Scarlatina,
Fishing, Life of a Textile Worker, etc.); Belgoskino
(Prostitution) and Azgoskino (The Struggle for Life, the
Oil Industry, etc.). Gosvoyenkino (State ^Military Kino) was
founded in September, 1924, with the object of providing

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special films for the instruction of the Red Army and also
films for the lay public ; it's productions include : Sport and
Manoeuvres, Shooting, Boxing, the SiUz Industry in Turke-
stan, Tanks, Aviation, the Transport of Troops on the
Railways, etc. Meschrabpom has produced films on the
Metric System, Alcoholism, Earth and Sky (illustrating the
movements of the heavenly bodies), First Aid, The Care of
the Sick, and Pudovkins's famous film. The Mechanics of the
Brain, illustrating the theories of Professor Pavlov, as well
as various industrial films (cotton industry, shipbuilding,
railway construction, and the manufacture of nails, boots,
books, new^spapers, etc.); and it has numerous other films
ready or in preparation, for instance : protection against
poison gas, the motor car industry, the hygiene of food,
physical culture, the film industry. Sovkino has produced
films on sound, alcohol, health in the factory, the development
of the amphibia, the milk industry, and has also a long list
ready or in preparation, including : The Sunflou:er Industry,
The Fight for the Harvest, 10 Years of Soviet Medicine,
Forest Dwellers, The Epoch of the Romanovs and Tolstoy,
Sun, Air and Water, The Nobel Expedition, etc.

An aspect of the cinema that has received special attention
in Russia is the study of the interests and requirements of the
cinema audience, for the purpose of which three principal
methods have been employed : 1. the keeping of a diary re-
cording observations of the reactions of the spectators to
various films by workers specially trained for this task (direct
observation); 2. the collection of wishes and opinions by
means of a questionnaire; 3. observation of some particular
audience over a period of from 3 to 6 months (experimental

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observation). In the case of illiterates the questionnaire
method is of course impracticable and in their case and that of
the less educated the method of direct observation has been
found the most satisfactory, while for the more skilled and
cultured class the questionnaire and the experimental method
are employed in conjunction.

The promoters of the educational cinema in Russia have
also been alive to the value of such technical devices as slow
motion, rapid motion, reverse motion, etc., for the purpose
of illustrating biological, chemical and other processes, as
well as for that of scientific research. Rapid motion photo-
graphy has, for instance, been used to illustrate the hatching
of a chicken, the growth of a plant and the construction of the
great elevator in Moscow.

It has also been realised that the educational value of the
cinema can be greatly enhanced if it is associated with
complementary organisations for the purpose of instruction,
explanation and study. In Moscow, Leningrad and Odessa,
for example, special educational cinema theatres have been
organised, equipped with library, reading room and foyer,
and it is planned to open many more in the next few years.
Explanatory pamphlets are available in the foyer for study by
the audience before witnessing the actual films ; such as that
prepared by Prof. L. N. Voskresensky and Pr. Doc. Miiller
in connection with the film. The Food Problem, and that by
A. M. Tiagay for Mechanics of the Brain, Further there has
been organised in Russia a body of lecturers to assist at the
exhibitions of the films and either explain the pictures as they
appear on the screen or give an introductory explanation be-
fore they are shown, as well as to answer any questions that

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the audience may care to ask. Exhibitions are also organised
in connection with certain films. In connection with the
great Potemkin film a special exhibition is organised in the
foyer consecrated to the events of the year 1905 and in the
reading room, social and historical literature connected with
this period are provided. In connection with the film,
Invisible Enemies of Man a microscope is available, through
which the audience may look in turn and examine, for in-
stance, a drop of milk or water brought by themselves.
Similarly a telescope is provided in connection with the film,
Astronomy ; and in connection with geological and botanical
films special excursions are organised. An interesting article
is devoted to the development of the News Bulletin Film — or

Chronicle as it is called in Russia, and another to the
training of film workers of every grade, for whom a thorough
and elaborate training is provided in particular by the
G.T.K. (State Technical College of Cinematography) in
Moscow and the Photo-Kino-Technikum at Leningrad.

L. M. Sukharevsky also gives an interesting account of the
use of the cinema in Russia for purposes of scientific and
technical research, for instance, in the hydro-technical
laboratory of Timiriazevskaya Academy, for studying the
movements of fluids, and at the laboratory of Professor Joffe
at Lesnoy for studying the distribution and transmission of
heat in factory furnaces and boilers ; at the latter, by means
of an entirely original device it was possible to photograph
the movement of the invisible heat-rays within the boiler and
so to make a number of discoveries the practical application
of which will entail a considerable saving of fuel.

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Another interesting article by L. M. Sukharevsky is de-
voted to the subject of the use of the cinema in schools and
other educational institutions of the U.S.S.R., as well as to
the experiments now being made with the talking film by
Professor Kovalenkova in Leningrad and Professor Romanov
and P. Tager in Moscow. In a short article it is impossible
to do justice to all the varied information contained in this
book, but no one after reading it could doubt what extra-
ordinarily interesting and valuable work is being done in
Russia in connection with cinematography and what a
cultural loss is being inflicted on the English people by the
obstacles opposed to the exhibition of Russian films in this
country.

Winifred Ray.

ALL TALKIE!

Potted dialogue, canned music and shrieking cabarets have
taken London by storm. All Talking, All Singing, All
Dancing, All Noise " is the order of the day. Plaza,
Empire, Tivoli, Astoria, Carlton, New Gallery, Piccadilly,
Regal and Rialto have all fallen for the Great God Micro-
phone.

There is scarcely a film to be seen in London. Fortunately,
I am a confirmed optimist, but really, the situation is getting

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desperate. The Empire, from noon to midnight vainl}
tries to satiate the public with Broadway Melody. On the
opening night the theatre was nearly pulled to pieces, and
still they come, six times a day. Anita Page is the new
world's sweetheart, and Charles King's theme songs are
whistled, shouted, crooned and yelled all over the place.

Show Boat, a most tedious, dismal thing, broke records at
the Tivoli and a palpitating public gasps to know whether
it was some extra girl or really Laura la Plante who sings
(very indifferently) Old Man River,

Mary Pickford's Coquette, which was completely inaudible,
and worse than the worst penny-in-the-slot machine has been
replaced by Vilma Banky in This Is Heaven, which it isn't,
and now w^e are waiting for Carl Laemmle's Million
Candle Power Picture " of bootleggers, booze and cabarets,
Broadway,

Speakeasy is probably the best of the bunch so far, because
it has continuous, swift movement, action, and a complete
lack of those distressing conversations between characters
who look as if their life depends upon their staying rooted
to one. particular spot for all time. Speakeasy certainly
shews what can be done with sound, but nevertheless great
was my joy when the Astoria included in the same pro-
gramme The Girl on the Barge, a charming lyric of real
cinematic beauty, and silent.

But still they come. I am assured by Mr. Fox's publicity
agent, a modest man, that Fox's Movietone Follies is 'Vthe
miracle of the sound screen ". All Talking ! All Singing ! !
All Dancing ! ! !

A Maelstrom of Melody and Mirth

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THE MOST DARING — DYNAMIC AND
LAVISH PRODUCTION THE WORLD HAS
EVER SEEN OR HEARD

And then again :

" A SAGA OF LOVE AND LOVELINESS THAT
WILL TAKE EUROPE BY STORM

I suppose we ought to shout " Hurrah but in reality,
of course,. Movietone Follies, which mainly consists of legs
and underclothes, and which carries songs beginning " Take
a Sugar Cookie is the sort of thing which is made by half-
wits for half-wits.

And after this we are to have Synthetic Sin, the story of
a good little girl who wanted to be a bad little girl. Oh God,
Oh Montreal !

There is, however, one bright spot on the horizon. I
tremble to mention it, but — there are hopes that we may see
a few Russian films. Those-in-the-know are hopeful that
the Labour Government will remove the ban which in the
past has mysteriously but rigidly met Soviet Russia's pro-
ductions. Dozens of Russian films are lying in London,
many others are easily obtainable.

With all due respect to Mr. Fox, this, to us, is news, real
news. We can put up with his Follies if we can have the
opportunity of appreciating Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Room.
Whether the news is true or not I do not know, but what I
do know, and what I do say in all earnestness, is that every-
one of us has got to go all out to make it true. Otherwise,
God help us and God help the Cinema !

A.W.

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CINEMAPHOBIA

With the advent of the talkies there has come a fresh out-
break of cinemaphobia. It's chief present manifestation is a
fear of the influence of the American " language upon our
classic English. This phase of the epidemic appears to be
particularly virulent in Great Britain, the traditional custo-
dian of pure speech. Cultured little boys and girls will be
demoralized by listening to the verbal prostitutions of
Hollywood.

Our children/' declares one British protestant, will
listen to drama after drama wherein the performers, whether
impersonating English peers, Russian spies, Roman soldiers
or South Sea Islanders, will deliver themselves in the accents
of Vermont or Kansas. Americans write English as well as
we do. The trouble is they do not talk English as we want
our children to talk it.

But there is also to be considered the purely American
crook film which will in effect become an American play. Can
our children listen to two or three of these weekly without
taking unto themselves the diction and ultimately, perhaps,
the mentality of the Chicago underworld or Charleston water

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front? Clearly something will have to be done if young
England is to remain young England."

There we have it. A typical case. A recrudescence of
the same morbid alarm that spread over America and England
when the movies first became popular. There would be no
escaping the baneful effect of viewing the manners and
behaviour of American roughnecks on the screen. Our
children would all want to be cowboys and crooks and
gentlemen villains, or soiled women, rich men's mistresses, or
sacrificial maidens. No wonder censorship boards sprang
into existence and righteous puritans rolled up their pale eyes
in holy horror at the impending collapse of morals and re-
ligion.

But cinemaphobia is not confined to these extremists. In
a somewhat milder form it is particularly prone to attack our
intellectuals, especially those who pursue the calling of
critics. It may almost be said to be indigenous to Kultur.
Like the gout, it serves as a symbol of polite superiority, and
accordingly w^hosoever would have it known that he is not of
the common herd develops a spleen against the Hollywood
movies.

In his cultivated way, the victim says the nastiest sort of
things about them. They are vulgar, meretricious, puerile,
born of stupidity, levelled to the mentalit}^ of morons — in
short, altogether unworthy of genteel attention. Neverthe-
less,— and this is one of the pecularities of his affliction — he
continues to give them his attention. Indeed, he appears
actually unable to let them alone, despite the pain they give
him.

To be sure, one should not smile at the afflictions of others.

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But these cinemaphobiacs sometimes remind me of the be-
havior of my otherwise intelHgent bull terrier when an old
junk man passes bv in his cart. For some unexplainable
reason he takes it into his head that he is being insulted,
personally and designedly insulted, and forthwith his ad-
renal glands are stim.ulated and he barks himself sick in
rabid protest.

It would seem as though there should be some way in which
these ^sensitive souls who are so upset by the movies could be
convinced that the movies are not intended for them ; that
they are made solely and explicitly for the crowd, for the
common people, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, for Papa
and Mama Snooks and the little Snookses. The Hollywood
producers have never had any thought of turning out pictures
for the intelligentsia. They have not the slightest animosity
tov/ard them. They do not even ask nor expect them to come
to the theatres. In truth, they scarcely know who or what
they are ; they have not the remotest interest in them, and
nothing is farther from their intentions than to insult them
or worry them.

Nevertheless, they insist upon being insulted and worried.
Of their own free will they attend the cinemas and permit
themselves to see things there that revolt their intelligence
and their artistic sensibilities. It appears never to occur to
them that they are no more obliged thus to torture themselves
than they are to go to Coney Island or Luna Park and there
gobble hot dogs and crackerjack, when they know that such
things make them ill.

If they would consciously realize that the blame is theirs
for indulging in a dissipation alien to their tastes and

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breeding, much clamor would be averted. But thev will not
do this. Neither will they muster sufficient will power to let
the movies alone. They will actually stand in line for a
ticket. The movies have a peculiar lure for them. Thev
detest them, along with the Yahoos and the muttonheads who
frankly enjoy them, yet they cannot keep awav from them.
Indeed, one is sometimes led to suspect that their denun-
ciation of motion pictures is but a defense mechanism
designed to protect their patrician amour-propre against the
secret pleasure they derive from this popular plebian form of
entertainment.

In an effort to explain the success and the popularitv of the
movies, and at the same time justify their personal attitude in
the matter, they declare that the general public patronizes
the pictures, not because it likes them, but because it must
find amusement and diversion somewhere, and the movies,
unworthy and unsatisfying as they are, oft'er the only oppor-
tunity. In the back of their heads, of course, they know this
is only talk. They do not for a moment believe it. Their
own admitted superior intelligence at once convicts them.
They are perfectly well aware that with automobiles and
radio and phonographs and dance halls and baseball and a
plethora of cheap literature the common people have plenty to
divert them aside from the cinema.

And they know, too, that if the movies did not satisfy the
crowds they would simply refuse to patronize them — in which
respect they are measurablv more sensible than their intel-
lectual betters. The people may not know what they want,
but they most assuredly know what they do not want, and
make no bones about rejecting it, as many a showman has

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learned to his grief. That they continue, therefore, to flock
to the pictures and incidentally support a score of movie fan
magazines, to make no mention of the daily writing of tens
of thousands of fan letters to their favorite actors, is un-
answerable evidence that the cinema fare they are receiving
meets in the main with their approval.

To contend that they would respond with equal interest to
better pictures is merely to raise a fog. For what are better
pictures? The critics themselves are the last persons who can
be brought into agreement on this score, One of them will
declare that Sunrise is an exceptional production, an oasis in
the cinema desert, a striking example of a better picture;
while at the same time another will dismiss it as claptrap and
put forward In Old Arizona or The Last Command as an
illustration of what a real picture should be; w^hereupon a
third brother, turning up his finical nose at all such rubbish,
will assure the world that until Hollywood can put out an-
other Sorrell and Son it might as well quit making pictures.

There is simply no satisfying these cine frondeurs, these
chronic malcontents. They do not want to be satisfied.
Why have a phobia if it cannot be nourished?

In the final analysis we discover that what actually under-
lies the cinemaphobia of our intellectuals, is not so much the
movies themselves as the source of their being. Hollywood
is the bete noire. Like Nazareth of old, no good thing can
possibly come out of it. It is without tradition, without
antecedents, without culture; a bounder, an upstart in the
sacred realm of art ; impudent and profane.

On the other hand, a motion picture from Berlin, from
Moscow, from Budapest, whatever its lack as compared with

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a Hollywood product, is assured of sympathetic reception by
the American movie scorner. It is invested with an impH-
cation of excellence, of artistry, of savoir vivre. That is
Europe. But Hollywood — tut, tut !

Hollywood is a phenomenon. A few years ago an un-
mapped community of bungalows scattered amid orange and
lemon groves, it to-day outranks in notoriety and popular
influence any other spot on the globe. A city sprung from an
Aladdin's lamp; fantastically rich and glamorous, inhabited
by peris and houris and imperious Midases — transformed
shopgirls and nonentities elevated to dazzling fame and
fortune. Such is the airy picture of it.

No wonder it disturbs the worshiper of tradition. He is
quite incapable of appraising it in its relation to the established
order. Like the medieval priest confronted with a prodigy of
nature, he instinctively regards it in his bewilderment as an
intrusion upon the fixed proprieties of the universe, and
seeks to cover his disquietude with noisy objurgations.

Fortunately for Hollywood, however, and the many
millions who look to it for diversion and enjoyment, the
fulminations of its critics resolve themselves into mere w^ind.
A review of its achievements, from the crude flickers of
its early days to the elaborate productions of to-day, offers
scant satisfaction to those who at first contemptuously ignored
it and later sought to belittle its accomplishments with
ridicule and detraction.

Hollywood knows its business. It has made a bouncing
success of it. So bouncing, in truth, and so glittering, that
we are sometimes tempted to believe that much of the dis-
paragement directed against it is inspired by envy. The

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established centers of European art and culture, each of which
in the beginning of film history had the same opportunity
as Hollywood, if not even far greater opportunity, have been
signally outstripped by this aggressive upstart of the Pacific
coast with its Yankee genius for sensing the taste of the public
and giving the world what it v^ants.

And now and again, while Europe has looked on agape
and scornful at the talking film, Hollywood has discerned the
signs of the times, has set industriously to work, and with
characteristic confidence has staked its whole existence on the
new order of cinema creation. That there should follow a
fresh outbreak of alarm and protest from puritan and purist
is quite to be expected. Hollywood merely making motions
was disturbing enough ; but that this forward creature should
now have a tongue, presents truly a most serious situation
for those w^ho feel themselves entrusted with the guardianship
of traditions and proprieties.

Clifford Howard.

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COMMENT AND REVIEW

Films in History. — No. 2.

Federicus Rex — Directed by A. Czerepy.

An extremely notable German absentee is Federicus
Rex, which must have been made nearly ten years ago, but,
nevertheless, is described by those qualified to judge as
undoubtably the most impressive film yet produced

Thus wrote the Sunday Express, on October the 3rd, 1927,
when conducting an inquiry concerning the legion of lost
films.

Those qualified to judge " for once knew what they were
judging about ! The execution scene is as impressive as
some of the best modern Russian stuff ; so that, allowing for
the year of production, we have a film worthy to rank in our
cinematographic history.

There is no disfigurement of Gosta-Berlingish morality so
often found in costume pictures. The tale is of a tyrant
who delights more in seeing his soldiers do the goose-step
than in turning Jenny Hasselquistes into Swedish snow : a
part that is never overplayed. When a deputation of

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generals wait for the Emperor with threatened resignations,
if he persists in exacting the extreme penalty of the law
from his own son, the actor behaves like a human being by
accepting the situation. The tale of a despot who. enjoys a
sensation of power by supervising machines yet experiences
only transitory satisfaction because he cannot rule non-
goose-steppers (human beings).

The goose-step . . . Halt . . . Take that man to Castle
Curstin for court-martial, the fifth button on his tunic has
not been polished . . . Three-cornered hats must be doft
three times, while intrigues are encouraged by the archi-
tecture as much as gestures by the clothes . . . Key-holes
(mix), shaped like ears, must be listened at : enormous
caskets stuffed with secret documents must be broken into.

A grand film, a film to be seen.

There is mental conflict behind the pageantry. The son
of the Emperor wants to play the flute; none of the
exaggeration of Hollywood's aspiring playwright who wants
to leave an enriched posterity, of poet pining to storm the
intelligentsia (and get into transition!), but a simple boy
who wants to play ephemeral tunes on the flute . . . Soldiers
cannot goose-step to the flute, but Mr. Czerepy does not let
the son win a competition for flutists at Atlantic City, in-
stead he allows the martinet to be true to life.

This film, revived to-day, would make many old-timers
cry, " There you are, I told you so; those were the grand
days for FILMS As far as Germany is concerned they
were.

OSVI'ELL BlAKESTON.

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BROADWAY

Stop that parrot crying, " You haven't seen anything
yet, folks."

Director Paul Fejos built a camera crane that can travel
600 feet a minute on a horizontal plane, and is capable of
every possible position and cost Uncle Carl Laemmle
$15,000. This little treasure operated in a set 70 feet high
and a city block wide and deep — I mean if Photoplay says so,
it is so ! And the name of the picture, folks, is Broad'way !

Now you will want to see Broadway, won't you, after all
that? It is a hundred per cent, talkie too, you can hear
Glenn Tryon telling Myrna Kennedy to remember " her
dear old, silver-haired mother " ; but Myrna does not pay
any more attention to it than you do ! She just acts crazy,
that girl ! After Uncle Laemmle had gone to the expense
of colouring the last song and dance (what dire things
colour did to the young man's face I) vou can imagine that
there was little left to buy intelligence !

The night clubs in Broadway are, as one of the characters
remarks, shooting galleries. ^len are shot in the back and
in the stomach, and then there is a rest for supper.
Detectives talk in slow, drawling voices, they are so con-
scious of the drama in their lives.

Little chorus girl is, although it may sound silly, not
that sort of a girl " ; and the villain is, although he may look
silly, that sort of a boy ". And have chorus girls got
legs, Mr. Carl Laem.mle, Jr.? Or did Louella Parsons ask
you that in the last interview^ ?

O.B.

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A BIG BOY'S BIG SCHEME.

Mr. J. D. Williams announces a £1,000,000 scheme for
building new studios near Elstree, and Mr. Williams (or
Jaydee as he is known to his fellow magnates) means
SOUND STUDIOS. He says : —

" Imagine a great talking film studio where, immediately
after an English spoken talking feature has been made, it is
able to offer its sets for the immediate shooting of the same
film in every Continental language. Thus, immediately
the English version is through, contingents of players and
directors from each European country can take over the same
sets, and shoot the same picture in their own language in
record time."

But reader, gentle reader, do you understand what this
means to you ? Instead of seeing Falconetti in the title role
of Carl Dreyer's film you might see Alma Taylor, or possibly
Ivy Duke might play Baranowskaja's part in Mother!

If ever ]Mr. Jaydee' s scheme matures I can see back
numbers of Close-Up selling for a king's ransom at
Christies.

O.B.

TWO TITLES TO REMEMBER

It is dangerous to speak of films still in prvoduction but a
film directed bv L. ]\Ioholy-Xagy is almost certain to be a
film of exceptional interest. The author of Malerie

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Fotografie Film who has been responsible for so many
advanced " studies in still photography is busy on The
Isle Of Hope, sl story of man and the ocean, which is being-
shot on the coast of Brittany.

Another new film, Washerwoman, is the German-made
feature for Baranowskaja ; but it is not generally known that
Valeska Gert is in the cast.

O.B.

RECENT TRADE SHOW

Wilhelm Thiele directed Nikolai Kolin, Gustav Frohlich
and Natalie Lissenko in Hurrah, Vm Alive! If the title
refers to the director or any of the artistes we cannot share
the pleasure : if it refers to the silent film we can only say
that it has never been more dead.

O.B.

DARTMOOR

A sequence in Anthony Asquith's new film, Dartmoor,
which he is now cutting, was written to be played in the
following way : — two lovers are in a cinema : the third
member of the triangle takes a seat behind them, and
observes nothing of the performance, in watching them with

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accumulating jealousy. In order not to have to take a film
to show on the screen, the expressions on the faces of the
lovers were cut in w^ith flashes of the orchestra working up
to the climax of a chase sequence, so that the type and tempo
of the picture can be deduced. This cutting was to be in a
gradually shortening rhythm.

Asquith, how^ever, realised that this lent itself especially
to talk-film technique, and he is going to write part of a
talkie, which the lovers will be ' hearing and seeing ' : no
scenes of this will be taken, however, the dialogue will
merely counterpoint the main action. This is an extension
of an obvious trick, but someone had to work it out.

R.B.

GEMS FROM THE REPORT OF THE BRITISH
BOARD OF FILM CENSORS.

REASONS FOR EXCEPTION BEING TAKEN TO CERTAIN
PRODUCTIONS.

1. Reflection on Wife of responsible British official
stationed in the East."

2. " Police firing on defenceless populace."

Such things, of course, are never done. Not even on
May Day.

3. " Incidents which convey false and derogatory impres-

sions of the Police Force in this country."
We remember the Goddard case ....

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4. Intimate biological studies unsuitable for general
exhibition."

Cosmos !

5. Unseemly display of a woman's undergarments."

Now, what constitutes the difference between a seemly
and an unseemly display of undergarments?

6. Crude Immorality."

They prefer the refined sort.

7. Women in alluring and provocative attitudes."

Ah!

8. Men and Women in bed together."

Disgusting !

9. Inflammatory sub-titles and political propaganda."

But not The Red Dancer,

This report of the Censors should rank with the best of our
comic literature. Consider the following extract, dealing with
the talkies " : — There has been no mechanical difficulty
in effecting this (deletion) hitherto, parts to which exception
is taken being simplv cut out ; but when the acting is
synchronised with dialogue or music, to delete even a foot
upsets the continuity of the whole of the reel ".

Whereas, of course, to delete scenes from a silent film like
Jeanne Ney does not upset the continuity at all. You

simply " cut out what you don't like, and nobody is any the
worse !

When will this farce be ended?

A.W.

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PARIS NOTES

From the 2nd to the 7th September, 1929, will be held in
Switzerland at the Chateau de la Sarraz (property of
Madame de Mandrot, and thanks to her hospitality) an
International Congress of Independent Cinematography.

The objects of the Congress are as follows : —

To establish a permanent alliance between the independent
groups (cinemas, salles specialisees) to effect the inter-
exchange of independent films existing in various countries.
Creation of groups and salles.

To prepare the organisation of an International Production
Co-operation, able to produce independent films according
to the directives of an international commission.

Such are the bare details of this Congress, of which the
consequences could be enormous for the future of the in-
dependent cinema in Europe, and which would bring
together some scores of the most noteworthy personalities of
the young International Cinema.

It is the Nouvelle Revue Francaise which has taken this
initiative, and it is to be hoped that this congress will be of
greater import than the multiple congresses which have
latterly taken place, and which Vv^ere distinguished only by
more or less interesting discussions, but w^hich never arrived
at any result of practical value.

•K- * *

I had the occasion to run into Jean Renoir recently, while
he was playing opposite Catherine Hessling under the
direction of Cavalcanti. Renoir told me of his misfortunes

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with his film Le Tournoi, of which the montage was com-
pletely changed, to such an extent, indeed, that Jean Renoir
did not wish to be known as the author of the film which
circulated with his name as director. I perform a duty \n
reporting his griefs, the more so as I have criticised his film
in Close Up, without knowing what I have just learnt.
Under such conditions the exercise of one's metier as critic
is somewhat difficult, for if one feels obliged to be severe
toward a film, one now must hesitate for fear of doing a
wrong to a director who is innocent of the jumble that is
presented to you.

It seems to me useless to go on lamenting much more about
this wretched and disagreeable business of cutting, of
changes which the author himself does not know the im-
portance of to the very day of the presentation, for the
talking film does not permit such sabotage. You see, I am
not without reason in saying that the coming of the sound

film and talking film is salutary for the cinema.

■X- *

Now, this still : the law of events probably willed it :
several misprints slipped into my last article. One must
naturally say — I am of the opinion that Pabst did not say
that to give me pleasure, for if the contrary had been my
opinion I would have attached no importance to what Pabst
had said.

Later, in the Semaine du Cinema Francais, read — that 98
per cent, of French directors should be obliged to seek an-
other trade, for unfortunately this decision was not vet
made, as I had the air of pretending in this article.

J. Lexauer.

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ENXORE LE CINEMA FRANXAIS.

]\Ir. Lenauer, dans sa petite mise au point publiee dans !e
precedent numero de Close Up, explique pourquoi il est ii
profondement decu par la valeur actuelle des films francais,
qui ne repond pas du tout a ce qu'il s'etait imagine. Qui
aime bien chatie bien c'est entendu, mais de la a enterrer
definitivement, il y a, me semble-t-il, une nuance qui
n'echappera a personne.

Je n'ai point voulu, dans ma precedente replique, inno-
center le moins du monde le cinema francais; je n'ai fait en
somme, par souci d'impartialite, que relever I'etroite parente
qui existait entre les films francais, allemands, anglais ou
americains, au point de vue des possibilites artistiques. Or
ces possibilites la sont quasi nulles dans TOUTE ENTRE-
PRISE COMMERCIALE ou Ton ne recherche avant tout
qu'a cloturer un exercice avec profit. Et pour cela on s'est
imagine, un peu partout, qu'il ne suffisait que de suivre les
gouts du public. Peut-etre verrons-nous une reaction se
dessiner a cet egard, mais, pour le moment, nous ne pouvons
reperer aucun signe avant-coureur.

Qu'il y ait une sensible difference de valeur entre la lit-
terature et le film francais, cela n'est pas douteux, mais il
incombe precisement aux jeunes de canaliser leur inspiration
dans I'expression cinegraphique. Si quelques-uns seulement
Tont essaye jusqu'ici, c'est sans doute en raison des diffi-
cultes que presentait un debut dans une telle carriere. Le
monde artistique francais est toujours tres divise, comment
pourrait-il en etre autrement lorsque les individus qui !e

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composent sont personnels et soucieux avant tout d'in-
dependance. Si chacun pouvait tourner les films qu'il
entend, dans un studio commun, et que toute liberte soit
laissee au metteur en scene, la production cinegraphique
s'enrichirait d'un certain nombre d'oeuvres de valeur. II
est des associations dans presque toutes les branches artis-
tiques, pourquoi n'en formerait-on point entre cinephiles,
scenaristes, metteurs en scene et acteurs? De tels groupe-
ments permettraient de construire un studio, d'acquerir !e
materiel necessaire, en un mot de frayer le chemin au cinema
intellectuel. Si Ton prenait des initiatives semblables, en
France, et il n'est pas dit que Ton ne s'y decide un jour, je
suis certain que le genie latin s'affirmerait alors par I'image
aussi bien qu'il le fait en litterature, peinture, etc. Un
mouvement, il ne suffit que de cela pour que Mr. Lenauer
ait a exhumer un cadavre en fort bonne sante.

F. Chevalley.

BOOK REVIEWS

Trop Pres des Etoiles. By Rene Guetta, Librarie Plon, 8,
rue Garanciere, Paris.

This book is simply a document, without pretension, and
written I believe, by a man who has no connection with the
cinema. But after the rather superficial opening chapters,
one discovers a number of very just criticisms, the more
notable because they are written with a complete absence of a

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desire to instruct, which is so fashionable at the moment. I
Hked, for instance, the chapter in which M. Guetta states
(though we ourselves doubt just a Httle) that the " stars '
live a serious life, ordered entirely by their work and that the
Hollywood orgies " of which the fan papers are full, are
only the invention of journalists void of better ideas with
which to fill the magazines.

And it is delightful of this author to insist on every
occasion, that above all the cinema demands laborious work
and that those who derive glory and profit from it, work hard
at their trade. It is a pleasure to find that the stupid legend
of the fairy-like life of the stars is destroyed again, for one
can never repeat often enough that the people who are so
much envied, have worked longer and more arduously, often
enough, than those who watch them in the cinema.

In a judicious comparison M. Guetta endeavours to find
the reason for the inferiority of the French film beside the
American product. It is good, but he is mistaken when he
says, " the technical methods are still so insufficient that the
word is really pretentious and the trade still very young."
It is possible that the word is pretentious and as far as I am
concerned, it is completely indifferent to me, Vv'hether the
cinema is an art or not. I for myself feel it is more, it
is a world. As for the trade, still so young " I think that
M. Guetta is on a false track. On the contrary the cinema
has rather too much craft and not enough youth ; but the
author wTites immediately afterwards of sound films and
talkies, reproaching his compatriots with their lack of under-
standing for this renewal. And he himself gives an answer
to " the trade's vouth." Xo one can honestlv doubt

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to-day the new possibilities of talkies and sound films and 't
can be said that the arrival of these films was necessary to
save the cinema from the danger of becoming sterile or of
growing old.

J.L.

HOLLYWOOD NOTES

At the same time that Hollywood handed Emil Jannings
his hat it also handed him the highest honor within its gift,
the annual award of merit bestowed by the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the most notable screen
work during the year. It was Jannings' performance in The
Way of All Flesh that won him this distinction. That Holly-
wood should at the same time have bowed him out and shown
him the way back to Germany, is but typical of the new
regime. The inarticulate actor, whatever his achievements,

has been relegated to the limbo of cinema relics.

* * *

Fortunately for the sake of history, Nanook of the North
and Mo ana were filmed before the advent of the talkies.
What was to have been a sister picture to these two classics,
done by the same director, Robert Flaherty, has been
definitely shelved. This was a film record of the tribal life
of the Hopi Indians of New Mexico, one of the most
picturesque and interesting of the remaining Indian tribes.
After months spent among them by Flaherty and his

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cameraman, Leon Shamroy, and the securing of several
thousand feet of film, the enterprise was called off by the
Fox Company, under whose auspices it was undertaken, and
the film has been consigned to the graveyard of silent
pictures.

* *

Back of the initial eagerness and determination to satisfy
the popular clamor for talking pictures lies the encouraging
revelation that producers are realizing at least thirty per cent,
greater profit on the talkies than they did on the silent
pictures. It was at first feared that the enormous sums re-
quired for new equipment, as well as the additional expenses
incidental to the producing of phonofilms, would entail a
decrease in profits. That the reverse should be proving true
is not only gratifying to the Hollywood adventurers, but is
also making all the more certain the permanancy of the
audible cinema and the eventual complete extinction of the
silent film.

* * *

Broadway Melody y M-G-M's first sound picture, has been
showing twice daily to capacity audiences at Grauman's
Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, since February first. At the
present writing the attendance figures total nearly five hun-
dred thousand. This is cited as typical, not only of the
popularity of singing and talking films, but also of
Hollywood's interest in its own product.

Having completed his fiasco as director of Gloria Swanson's
ill-fated Queen Kelly, Eric von Stroheim is about to make
his debut as an actor in a talking film. This is The Great

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Gabbo, directed by James Cruze. Not in fifteen years has
Von Stroheim appeared in a picture directed by anyone other
than himself.

* *

The Technicolor Company are producing a series of two-
reel pictures under the general title of Great Events.'' Each
of them has for its subject some dramatic, colorful moment
of history. The two so far completed, and released under
the M-G-M banner, are Madame DuBarry and Manchu Love,

The third, now in production, is Light of India,

* * *

The talkies are making possible a new form of cinema
publicity by means of radio. The Fox Company recently
inaugurated this new method of picture advertising by broad-
casting one of their musical films directly from the theatre in
which it was showing. The success of this venture has
prompted other companies to follow^ suit, and radio programs
will soon include these film broadcastings as regular features.
Experience in the broadcasting of grand opera, symphony
concerts, prize fights, baseball games, and the like, has
demonstrated that this transmission of entertainment free of
cost to radio listeners is no detriment to patronage, but, on
the contrary, appears to stimulate it by inspiring public
attention and interest.

* * ^

Trader Horn, now being filmed in Africa by M-G-M under
the direction of W. S. Van Dyke, will have as a prelude a
short talk by Trader Horn himself. This unique and pic-
turesque personality was recently a visitor to Hollywood and
was induced to pose and talk for the picture.

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John Barrymore's singing voice will be heard in his initial
-itaphone production for Warner Brothers, General Crack,
^'he story, adapted from a novel by George Preedy, depicts
le loves and battles of a youth born of a gypsy princess and
, nobleman, and promises to afford Barrymore an ideal

ehicle for his finished stagecraft.

^ ^

John McCormack, the Irish tenor, has signed a contract
«vith the Fox Company for a series of talking and singing
pictures. In furtherance of this he has cancelled his concert
tour and will begin work on his first picture some time in
August. The preliminary scenes will be made in Ireland,
v^here he now is, and later he will come to Hollywood, to
Dmplete the film. The scenario is being written directly for
im by Tom Barry, the American playwright and author of

•he phonofilm version of In Old Arizona.

* * *

With the selection of Winifred Westover, the former wife
o: Bill Hart, as the title character in the phonofilm adaptation
tsf Fanny Hurst's Lummox, Herbert Brenon is now in the
midst of his work as director of the picture. Miss Hurst is
herself in Hollywood, supervising the production at the
United Artists studio.

* *

Phonofilm shots of the London water front will be incor-
porated in Paramount's forthcoming picture. The Mysterious
')r. Fu Manchu. The melodrama, by Sax Rohmer, has its
>cale in the Limehouse district, and dramatic color will be
I yen the film by the bellow of fog horns, the shrill whine
of police-boat sirens, the whistles of freight barges, and all

CLOSE UP

the rest of the sounds — even to the lapping of the murky
waters — characteristic of the Thames and its multifarious
activities.

^ ¥^ ^

Among the popular silent films scheduled for revival on
the talking screen are Huckleberry Finn, with Jackie Coogan
in the title role, A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur, with
Will Rogers, and Humoresque, in which it is rumored that
Jascha Heifitz, now the husband of Florenc A^idor, will enact
the leading role — that of a Jewish boy who rises from obs-
curity to become a world-famous violinist."

C.H.

NOUVELLE EQUIPE, 3e annee, no 2, Printemps 1929
(le numero : 10 fr. ; 152 pp.)- Redaction et Administration :
29, rue Nestor de Tiere, Bruxelles.

Sommaire : Stanislas FU^NIET, La Recompense de
rOuvrier. - — Robert GUIETTE, Communion. — Dexys
LE CHARTREUX, De Fonte Lucis ac Semitis Vitae
(fragments traduits du latin par E. Leclef). — Raoix
HAUTIER, Vers VAnge sans Visage. —Paul WERRIE,
Le Cinema sovietiqne. — Yvax LENAIN, Fil d'Ariane. —
Simon de CYRENE. Xotes de Vie. — Jan MILO,
Poeme. — Jacques CROKAERT, La Guerre et la Paix. —
Robert GUIETTE, L' Homme de Cour. — Georges
SCHELSTRAETE, Nekael sait pleiirer. — L. MOUREAU,
En marge de la Crise d\in Regime.

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LA VIE INTERNATIONALE: Marcel LALOIRE,
Vers les Etats-Unis d'Europe? — LA VIE ECONO-
MIQUE: Georges TELLERMAN, La Concentration
industrielle — LES BISQUES, par Robert SEBASTIEN.
— LE CINEMATOGRAPH, par Paul WERRIE. —
REVUE DES REVUES: Leon MOUREAU, Reflexions
politiques et sociales de Paul ClaudeL — BIBLIO-
GRAPHIE. — HORS-TEXTE: Un Lino de Pierre
Flouquet ; C reproductions.

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VARIETES"

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Henri Vandeputte Habitudes preferees.

Paul Fier ens Des rues et des carrefours (Lettre de Paris).

Denis Marion Le sentiment critique.

Pierre Courthion La boite a surprise (tableau des mceurs artistiques

contemporaines) .

Andre Delons Le cinema a Paris.

Franz Hellens Chronique des disques.

Nico Rost Chroniques de Berlin

Audre de Ridder L'anthologie esth^tique.

P.-G. van Hecke La peinture.

Gille Anthelme Les sports.

Bernard Brunius Inventeurs et Inventions.

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Kenneth Macpherson

The Negro Actor and the American Movies Geraldyn Dismond

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Letter from Walter White
Letter from Paul Green

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Of Negro Motion Pictures ♦ ♦ ♦ Elmer Carter

Black Fanfare ♦ » . ♦ ♦ Oswell Blakeston

London and the Negro Film ♦ ♦ Hay Chowl

Elstree's First Talkie . ♦ ♦ • Hugh Castle
Comment and Review

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Vol. V No. 2 August 1929

AS IS

BY THE EDITOR

Effort at universal cinema has well shown that the only
approach to it is strictly racial cinema.

We have seen that the onlv way to understand peoples is
in their essence, not — as has been tried and tried again — their
compounding. Seeing that internationalism is the aim,
clearh' the first necessity is nations. A brotherhood between
nation and nation is founded not on one nation taking over
the characteristics formed from the other's peculiar growth
and development, but upon a higher understanding and
respect. This in cinema above all else has been well proved.
If instead of nations we have peoples imitating the diluted
moral esperanto of other peoples, in the end there is
neither understanding nor justifixcation for the continuance of
irrelevance.

When Ralph Forbes and Lilian Gish are cast as Austrians
and directed in an Austrian scenario by an American director
in Hollywood, we have neither America nor have we Austria.

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Austrians go white and leave the theatre while Americans
are merely sceptical, sensing rightly that this American
Tragedy has taught them nothing of Austria, nor for that
matter of America. When Pabst, an Austrian, opens your
eves to Vienna broken by war and war's end, you understand
so much more not only about Vienna but about casual villainy
in general and much about humanitarianism. It makes you
aware of Austria. And — this is important — Austria as a
nation. Its story in evoking sympathy, wakes sympathy for
Austria as Austria and not as something badly imitating you.

It is the same when ^Margaret ]Mann sends four Tyrolean,
country boys to war. What is her " Universal Message "
of motherhood (what was Poirier's) but her director's ability
to make her look sentimentallv forsaken, waving her over-
ornate lads through over-ornate studio streets to studio war?

You don't sympathise with Russia, you have no sense of
international understanding, when John Barrymore postures
m a Russian story with impeccable, special, ever-softening
lens to gain him sex-appeal. Let one fine, honest voice — say
Eisenstein's — tell you about Russia, and supposing you are
man enough not to scramble with your stocking of savings to
bury in the garden ; that is to say, if you haven't got that kind
of mind, you \yil\ understand that none of the v\-orld has
benefited by the silly tales-told-out-of-school fired competi-
tionally from miles of newspapers and millions of mouths
through tw^elve years of unconscious (for that is what it
amounts to) confession.

What does friend Borzage get from his attempt to put Italy
on the International map? .... One of the all too few bright
moments of the Mussolini campus — the storming of projection

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room and burning of the film. Long live Italy, if you feel
that way about it, though clearly aesthetic motives are not
to be ascribed. I won't tell you, by the way, which fam^ous
German cameraman considered this daubed, unedged, grey
soupiness the best photography, mein kind, the world has
ever seen !

Now take (since everybody else does) the negro film and
decide whether you think international cinema is here going
to mean a thing when a white man directs, no matter how
charmingly, blacks so that they must always seem to be
direfully dependent on white man's wisdom. For all the
coal black hearts in Dixie must beat to please, — meekly
Uncle — Tom, pleasant, thankful serf beats. Confronted
with an instability (his own) which he calls a Race Problem,
the white man is always going to portray the negro as he likes
to see him, no matter how benevolently. Benevolence, indeed,
is the danger. Apart from being the most tricky and unkind
form of human selfishness, it is often more than humbug
and always less than seeing, and does to sugar coat much
that is not, so to speak, edible.

Stepin Fetchit can give us more than a promise though the
trouble is he isn't meant to do as much. But watch him
move and you will see what we mean. There is more than
promise in the jungle, lissom lankness that slams down some-
thing unanswerable in front of what we let go past as beauty.
This splendour of being is one good key to open a good many
doors, all the way to our goal simply. Something has been
given us here, set (if you will) in a physical symbol, though
you might with equal truth call it a mind symbol or a psychic
symbol. Something by which we know without any further

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need to bother, that we are only at the outer edge of seeing.

Fetchit waves loose racial hands and they, like life, touch
everything that the world contains. They are startling with
what nobody meant to put into them, but which is all too
there — histories, sagas, dynasties, Keatsian edges off things
make a voiceless trouble back of the eye and the recording
mind. Only afterwards you really are beset by them. They
are not Fetchit's hands, they are the big step we have not
yet taken. First of all these so utterly not incantationish
gestures are unselfconsciousness, perfectly inherited greatness
of race and of race mind. It only begins there. We can
scrap every trained toe waggle of a ballerina for the very least
of these movements. Making this greatness articulate for
the cinema is the fascinating pioneer work of somebodv.

Ourselves we should be dubious of white man's patronage.
White man's patronage is apt to end in credos. The negro
is apt to be overlooked in the hullabaloo of me being dis-
tinguished by shaking my brief for him under your nose.
Constraining, alas, people like Wyndham Lewis to be stung
into Palefaced and paler gutted repudiation. And where if
you please is the negro all this time, other than in his own
world and among his own people, unaware he is being broken
like bun in the twittering fingers of so many hundred thousand
drawing room tea fights. Glory be is only your maiden
aunt's shudder the other side up. The negro is not here to
be thus not understood and let go. Glory be helps him no
more than nothing and solves nothing. Analysis has not
begun 3^et.

Big issues are at once opened up. In being dazzled by the
hands of Fetchit do not let us overlook the head of Fetchit -

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It is the negroid in Fetchit which is most sheerlv line. Race.
The national, if one may bring it in terms of our contention.
Xegro being white John Citizen (excuse me) can now be
brought in Hne with wliat we have said about ]^Iargaret ]\Iann
and her four no more Tyrolean than I am bovs. The negro
does not have to come to us for civilization, culture or
religion. Periodically we (the white races) are shown we are
neither civilized, cultured nor religious. It would hardlv be
progress for those who have retained what Fetchit, the symbol,
has retained, to lose it for regimented, squad-drill tactics of
our minds and bodies. The negro's civilization is capable
of less pinched, less wary, less unhappv tvpes.

Xo, we have not come to the beginning of understanding.
Our idea of the Orient is as oriental as the cotton bedroom
kimonos in any sales catalogue. Our idea of the negro is
as negroid as Al Jolson and no more. We sentimentalise
about the negro, we admire him, we shout hurrah, as it might
be, when he is mentioned — some of us still walk out of the
room when he comes in — and how far if so little we understand
ourselves do we understand him ?

I have seen people brace their shoulders and spit without
the grace and iustiilcation of a cat at his mention in casual
conversation. A boat has jtist brought me back from the
north of the world. The most blotched of the blotched
harridans from Wigan was heard to remark that the
Laplanders had horrible faces. Fat folds of evil and re-
pression sat on her funnv little mouth. Her eyes were the
eyes of boiled trout, steaming wanly through pince-nez.
Every time the boat lurched, ungoverned, flapping knees
twitched and she belched. In the faces of the Lapps was the

CLOSE VP

quiet, earthy grandeur of free little gnomes and reindeer ran
among tiiem.

Let the negro, then, film himself, be free to give something
equal to his music, his dance, his sculpture — in which alone
you have a clue to new visual discovery, as trench ent in its
way as the first shock of what is now broadly referred to as
the Russian method.

The negro documentaire of the negro. Think what might
be in it. The negro as an observer of himself. As his own
historian. As his own agitator. Talking films took films
from us but they have given us a glimpse of him, and the
momentous edge of possibility is set punkah-fashion waving,
fanning something entirely and wholly new, that may expand
not in the negroid alone, but throughout the whole of a
rationalised international cinema.

Kenneth Macpherson.

THE NEGRO ACTOR AND THE
AMERICAN MOVIES

By Geraldyn Dismond

— well-known American Negro writer.

The Negro actor and the part he has played in the
development of the American movie is one of the most

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' interesting phases of what is now one of America's greatest
industries. Because no true picture of American life can
be drawn without the Negro, his advent into the movies was
inevitable ; but also because of the prejudices which have
hampered and retarded him since his coming to America,
his debut was delayed. To be perfectly frank, the Xegro
entered the movies through a back door, labelled "servants'
entrance". Hovrever, beggars cannot be choosers, and it
is to his credit that he accepted the parts assigned to him,
made good and opened the door for bigger things.

In order to better appreciate the attitude of the white
producer toward Xegro talent, we must keep in mind the
change in the social status of the group. To put it briefly,
at the time of the Civil War, the northern white man
considered the Xegro a black angel without wings, about
whom he must busy himself in spirit and deed. On the other
hand, the southern white man detested X^egroes in general
and liked his particular blacks. After the Xegro had been
given his freedom, there soon arose the feeling that he was
an economic and social menace and we find him depicted
everywhere as a rapist. Then the white dilettante, exhausted
with trying to find new thrills, stumbled over the Negro and
exclaimed, "See what we have overlooked I These beloved
vagabonds ! Our own X^groes, right here at home !" And
voila ! — Black became the fad.

These types of thinking have influenced the development
of the X^egro as part of the moving picture game. Within
the remembrance of all of us and still in some pictures and
stage productions, we find whites blacked up for indifferent

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imitations of their dark brothers. But more and more is the
practice falling into disrepute. The old cry that Negroes
with ability cannot be found has not held water. In fact,
it has been conclusively proven that under the proper
director, the Negro turns out some of the best acting on the
American screen and stage. A people of many emotions
with an inherent sense of humour, and a love for play, they
do not find it difficult to express themselves in action, or to
bring to that expresion the genuineness and enjoyment they
feel. Nevertheless, excuse after excuse has been made to
keep the Negro off the silver sheet and it was the servants of
white stars, who as individuals, first got the breaks.

For example, Oscar Smith, who came to the Paramount
Studios nine years ago as the personal servant of Wallace
Reid, and at present owns the bootblack stand at the studio,
has worked in two hundred pictures and has recentlv received
a contract exclusively for Paramount talking pictures.
Stepin Fetchit, who is billed as the star in the William Fox
all-talkie Hearts in Dixie was the porter on the Fox lots.
Carolyn Snowden, who played opposite Fetchit in In old
Kentucky was also a lady's maid for a prominent star. And
so it went. Another point is also true. They worked in
the early days in character. By that I mean, often the star's
maid went on as her maid, provided she could be made to look
homely and black enough. And all Negroes, perhaps with
one or two exceptions, were cast as menials and as comedy
characters.

As for the exceptions, thev were for the most part African
chiefs and the members of their tribes. One, however, I do

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recall from my first experiences with movies. He is Xoble
Johnson of whom practically nothing is heard now in
connection with Negroes. The last time I saw him, he was
playing the part of a Mexican bandit, and rumor has it that
he owns considerable stock in the company for which he works
and is used for all parts calling for a swarthy skin. The
other two unusual individuals are Sunshine Sammy and
Farina, the two juvenile favourites of the Hal Roach — Our
Gang Comedies.

Xegroes in any great numbers were first used for atmos-
phere— for mobs, levee and plantation, native African jungle
and popular black belt cabaret scenes. Griffith's The Birth
of a Nation, which, by the way, employed the old rape idea,
and for that reason was so distasteful to Negroes, is an
excellent example of the Negro as atmosphere. West of
Zanzibar, a popular Lon Chaney film, and the Stanley in
Africa pictures used large groups of Negroes for the jungle
scenes.

The next move on the part of producers was evident.
Isolated Negro characters and Negroes as atmosphere were
combined for the Universal feature production. Uncle Tom's
Cabin, with James B. Lowe as Uncle Tom. Not all Negro
parts, however, even in this picture, were assigned to
Negroes. Topsy, Liza, her husband and baby were played
by whites, but up to the introduction of the "Talkies", Uncle
Town's Cabin was the outstanding accomplishment of the
Negro in the movie world.

It is significant that with the coming of talkies, the first
all-Negro feature pictures were attempted by the big

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companies. White America has always made much of the
fact that all Negroes can sing and dance. Moreover, it is
supposed to get particular pleasure out of the Negro's dialect,
his queer colloquialisms, and his quaint humour. The movie
of yesterday, to be sure, let him dance, but his greatest charm
was lost by silence. With the talkie, the Negro is at his
best. Now he can be heard in song and speech. And no
one who has seen the William. Fox Hearts in Dixie, featuring
Stepin Fetchit, Clarence Muse and Eugene Jackson, or Al
Christie's Melancholy Dame, an Octavius Roy Cohen all-
talking comedy with Evelyn Freer, Eddie Thompson and
Spencer Williams, will disagree with the fact that the Negro's
voice can be a thing of beautv in spite of the mechanics of
this new venture in the art of the movies.

Of these two Negro all-talkies which are now playing
Broadway, Hearts in Dixie is by far the most pretentious.
The story as such, is nil. Here indeed, we have the ^'beloved
vagabond". It does embody the idea, however, that some
Negros are not superstitious and are anxious to better them-
selves, and is a rather entertaining picture of plantation life;
but it lacks substance. You were ever conscious of the fact
that the producers were not interested in the plot, but rather
in the talking and singing sequence. The ensemble singing
and the voice of Clarence Muse were decided contributions
and well worth the price of admission. The Melancholy
Dame, a short comedy with little music or dancing, depends
principally upon its comic dialogue which is given in the best
Octavius Roy Cohen dialect, for its interest. Incidentally^
Mr. Cohen, himself, directed the picture.

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Of course, it is generally believed that the Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer production, Hallelujah, will be the ace of the all-Negro
talking pictures. King Vidor is directing. Daniel Haynes,
formerly of Shozv Boat, has the principal role and is
supported by Nina May AIcKenney of the Blackbirds of 1929 •
Victoria Spivey, a "blues" recording artist; Fannie
DeKnight, who played in Lula Belle ; Langdon Grey, a non-
professional, and 375 extras. There are forty singing
sequences, including folk songs, spirituals, work songs and
blues. Eva Jessye, a Negro, who has compiled a book of
spirituals and trained the original '"Dixie Jubilee Choir", is
directing the music. The story, which is devoid of propa-
ganda, is that of a country boy who temporarily succumbs
to the wiles of a woman, is beset with tragedy, and ultimately
finds peace. It is a known fact that several studios are i
holding up all-Negro productions until the fate of Hallelujah
has been pronounced.

In the meantime, Shoiu Boat, a talkie using the present
American Show Boat Company of both blacks and whites,
has been made by Universal and had its premiere at Miami
and Palm Beach, March 17th ; Ethel Waters, greatest
comedienne of her race, and Mamie Smith, blues singer of
note, have been signed up by Warner Brothers for Vitaphone
comedies ; Sissle and Blake, internationally famous kings of
syncopation, have been released by Warner Brothers ; Christie
Studio is preparing another Negro film ; Eric Von Stroheim
is working on the Negro sequence of The Swamp, and John
Ford's Strong Boy is using a large number of Negroes.

Three by-products have resulted from this slow recognition

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of the Negro as movie material — Negro film corporations,
Negro and white film corporations, and white corporations,
all for the production of Negro pictures. They have the same
motives, namely, to present Negro films about and for
Negroes, showing them not as fools and servants, but as
human beings with the same emotions, desires and weaknesses
as other people's ; and to share in the profits of this great
industry. Of this group, perhaps the three best known
companies are The ]^licheaux Pictures Companv of New
York City, an all-coloured concern whose latest releases are
The Wages of Sin and The Broken Violin; The Colored
Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia, a white concern,
which produced three favorites — A Prince of His People, Ten
Nights in a Barroom, starring Charles Gilpin, and Children
of Fate ; and the Liberty Photoplays, Inc., of Boston, a mixed
company, no picture of which I have seen. There is rumor
of the formation in New York City of The Tono-Film, an all-
Negro corporation, for exclusive Negro talking pictures and
that its officers and directors will include Paul Robeson,
Noble Sissle, ]\Iaceo Pinkard, Earl and ^Maurice Dancer, J.
C. Johnson, F. E. Miller and \Yill \^odery, all of whom are
known in America and abroad. So far, the pictures released
by this group have been second rate in subject matter,
direction and photography, but they do keep before the public
the great possibilities of the Negro in movies.

In conclusion, it must be conceded by the most skeptical
that the Negro has at last become an integral part of the
Motion Picture Industrv. And his benefits will be more than
monetary. Because of the Negro movie, many a prejudiced

Victoria Spivey, famous
" Blues " singer, who plays
the role of " Missy " in
Hallelujah, Metro-Goldwvn-
Mayer's new film, directed bv
King Vidor.

Nina ^lae :\lcKenney. negro
dancer, who plays in Hallelu-
jah .

Photo : Ruth Harriet Louise

Daniel Havnes, who plays lead in Hallelujah, King Vidor's all-ne^ro film

for M. G. M.

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white who would not accept a Negro unless as a servant, will
be compelled to admit that at least he can be something else ;
many an indifferent white will be beguiled into a positive
attitude of friendliness ; many a Negro will have his race-
consciousness and self-respect stimulated. In short, the
Negro movie actor is a means of getting acquainted with
Negroes and under proper direction and sympathetic treat-
ment can easily become a potent factor in our great struggle
for better race relations. And the talkie which is being
despised in certain artistic circles is giving him the great
opportunity to prove his right to a place on the screen.

BLACK SHADOWS

When you read a Negro book, novel or play or poems,
when you hear a Negro sing (and Marion Anderson sings at
this year's Promenades), you find a new life, very rich, very
swift, intense and dynamic ; unlike ours, but full of things
which we cannot help knowing we lack. When you go to
the screen, you see objects like iVnita Page, or a bit of French
fun about the outskirts of Paris, or a German film in which
you are led into a million rooms. You perhaps see a Russian
film, and you think here it is again, life an affair to be taken
and settled with and made something of. Life very new.

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and something to be insisted on. You think that perhaps if
there were some Negro films, they might have the same range
and sweep and drive. Themes that matter are w^hat are
wanted, we know, and films made by people who dare to be
big. You know that some of the black authors have the
scope, and that they almost cannot help having the themes.
You wonder, could there be a Negro cinema?

You don't have to w^onder why there isn't. Big business
makes that clear. And perhaps there couldn't be in
America, and France would make it chic and run these films
in outhouses in the Rue Blomet w^ith postage-stamp screens,
strapontins and long, long intervals. And Germany might
have, but Germany is so mixed up w^ith making films to please
other coutries. It all seems very unlikely, and you go back
to America, because they are, after all, beginning to make
a few, though in the wrong way, and you come to the con-
clusion that the only thing may be that in time perhaps,
among the romantic mammy pictures, one or two serious
black Othello pictures may slip out. It seems that must be
the only way that can happen. Quietly, one or two here
and there, and not too much fuss about it.

But one wishes .... one wishes there were young
Negroes who could and would get together and make their
films, and let us in to see them perhaps, but make them
anyway, and make them black. One wishes, when one
turns over in one's mind the richness laid there by Negro
writers and singers, and then one looke at the screen as it is
and wonders why all this w^orld finds no place there. All
this world whose speed and sensitiveness and saltness and —
ironically — freedom, is locked in the word black

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If you look at the films in which Negroes have figured,
3^ou will find a few travel pictures, Zeliv, Voyage au Congo,
The Black Journey, Samba, and one or two German ones,
and the Voyage au Liberia, which I just missed at the Vieux
Colombier. None of these are as good as they might be,
qua films. For the rest, your list will be limited to pictures,
some stills of which appear in this issue, in which Negroes
play subsidiary parts. A black band playing in the back-
ground, or a waiter who may or may not be put in for
" atnlosphere " or comic relief. There are some talkies.
There are no really serious Negro films. Samba and Zeliv
are exceptions. These were not only filmed in native
country, but they enact native stories. Samba, I have not
seen ; but Zeliv is by no means good, though it cannot help
being interesting. As to the jazz side, Josephine Baker
acted in a French film, and was surprisingly good. But
Josephine Baker is more an invention of Paris than an inter-
preter of jazz, and this film was one of those affairs in which
the French run riot with le decor moderne, and neglected
the make-up of the Baker so much that she was hardly
recognisable from one scene to the next. So that may be
called a typically French film, and not Negro. Then there
was another French picture with Catherine Hessling and
Johnny Hudgins .... But there are no really serious
Negro films.

And there ought to be-
There ought to be because there are Negro novels, and
plays and poems. There ought to be because the Negro is
marvellously photogenic, and the cinema is equally an affair
•of blacks and whites. There ought to be because here is a

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race which has, in short time, expressed itself vitally in
literature and a consideration of that literature shows that
the qualities which make it so vital are exactly those which
films demand.

It is a stock phrase that novels such as The Walls of
Jerico, Home to Harlem (but not Banjo), Fire in the Flint,
Black Sadie, and so on, possesses " sense of rhythm It
is an equal cliche that the Negro possesses wonderful

emotional responsiveness and that he can move
beautifully. Well, films are a matter of rhythm, and the
way these novels, and Porgy, and other plays, develop is
rhythmic. It is not so generally recognised that the
Negroes have a great sense of imagery. But if you read
Hughes intelligently, and are not obsessed by self-created
smart fun of the jazz rhythms there, you will see vivid and
easy images. He says that a railway arch is a sad song in
the air, and I ask you to look at that for a moment. And
again. That is what he can do, and others can do things
like it. That is what Negroes have to give, and because
they have something to give, that is why there should be a
black cinema, as well as an approximately white one. If
Negroes had nothing more to say than what we ourselves
say already, would that be very interesting ? It is because
colour counts that black films should be made alongside
white-ish ones.

Because it is the reason why Negro books and books about
Negroes have been so belatedly popular in London this
spring {Scarlet Sister Mary, The Magic Island, Mamba's
Daughters) that there is a difference of mentality. Something
which we have not got, but which we may respond to. We

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may not fully understand it, but we can in part appreciate it.
We certainly can't reproduce it, and that is why there
should be Negro films made by and about them. Not black
films passing white, and not, please, white passing for black.
We want no van Vechtens of the films.

The talkies have meant one thing, at any rate. They
have meant the discovery that Negroes have a voice. With
great courage, Hallelujah was made. I am afraid I don't
expect much of Hallelujah, but it was an experiment, and
other firms are rushing to make coloured talkies. Fox's
Heart's in Dixie got very good notices, despite being hard
to hear, and its dancing was grand. But these all perpetuate
the way down South in the land of cotton idea, which really
ought to be forgotten. All this Uncle Tom business
(though that film, I believe, was the first in which an im-
portant Negro actor had an important part). If you want
to know what way down South means to a Negro actor, you
can read Fire in the Flint, and your pillow will be damp,
and it won't be the ceiling leaking. Of course, it is some-
thing that films with coloured casts are being made, it is an
experiment, though it should have been made long before,
when Cecil de Mille first had the script of Porgy. But the
fact that there is a slight movement, and the fact that Porgy
and Hearts in Dixie were shown soon after each other in
London, and Blackbirds one prays, will follow, makes it a
good time to consider and ask what is going to be done.
Now that it has been discovered that Negroes have voices,
let it be found too that they have something to say.

Not too many Lenox Avenue films. The problems of the
educated urban Negro, but not only Harlem joints. What

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good will that do? A few are all very well, but they give a
wrong impression, and there is so much else, so much that
is at once bigger and the Negro's own property. Not too
much race-problem either (though you can read in The
American Mercury of last April on " learning to be black "
and see a script waiting). I mean, if you bear in mind
sufficiently that colour counts, you get, when you meet a
great work, beyond colour, though colour could only possibly
have made it. But you get to humanity and so on. Just
like us, really is an insult, and who's us " anyway?
' Matters of tragedy, heaven knows there are enough, and
matters of history. Has anyone ever thought of filming
some Negro hero? No. Because it would be realised that
here was a matter of serious expression. Yet take the story
of Henri Chrsitophe (if only from Black Majesty) or take
some of the stories in The Magic Island. What films there
would be ! It is shameful to be denied them. And take the
j)leas which reach the Times correspondence column on the
subject of our gin exportations to the Gold Coast, and read
West African Secret Societies, Take these subjects, and
you would have epic themes for the cinema, which dies for
want of tliem. Negro history, which so little is known
about .... the story of Phyllis Wheatley .... and not
stories of mammies in coloured handkerchiefs, and not only
Harlem jazz films. Serious films. The two sides w^hich we
as whites are so little sensible of, the historical and the life of
the urban, educated Negro.

And why not a little better and a little more travel films ?
In Germany, talking about Samba, they said to me, But
why do not you, with your Empire, go out and do things

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like this?" We have gone to the Maoris, but I do not think
South Africa or the West Indies have been realised for the
life they contain. Not a question of flying around with
Cobham, and landing and then showing what a funn/ way
native women do their hair. But send out a well-equipped
expedition, with men who know how to film and men who
have studied the races they are visiting. Then there would
be documents of interest to everybody. Karl Freund is in
Albania; maybe Albanians are interesting . . . The best
film is the perfect documentary, in w^iich the themes and
drama of the country under review is brought out and de-
veloped with as much care and sensitiveness as any studio
work-of-art. These might be made by white men; I cannot
see the best work in studios coming from w^hite directors
working with a coloured cast. I cannot see how they can
understand them. If only in time, Negro directors and
Negro cameramen could be encouraged into existence . . . .

But there is a slight start, Fetchit has come into his own,
and if it can be guided, and if we keep our heads in the
direction of what we expect, and don't lower them to what
we are given, we shall be given something in time worth
while.

It is all a question of drama and conflict on the screen,
and the screen is hard up for it, whereas the Negro comes
into drama and conflict at every turn, it being the heritage
the white man never thought he was giving him. And
when with this you get responsiveness and grace and rhythm,
you see quite suddenly that if the screen doesn't take care,
the things it most wants will be put into other mediums more
open to Negroes, where their presence will cause people to

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say, there's all this, why don't we get it on the screen
and why don't we?.

We all know why, but the obstacles can't be permanent
and insuperable, and surely, surely, we are all old enough
to insist on our right to beauty, which is meaning, wherever
we can find it? And we don't get it by blacking our faces
and wearing white gloves, and I don't think we get it from
real Negroes having to live down to the pleasant banjo-
strumming, cotton-field singing idea we have of them. We
want the real thing, always, and the cinema demands the
real thing, and heaven knows there is enough reality waiting
there, if black shadows might move on our screens in their
own patterns, and have their own screens, too, to do it on.
And not rely on white patronage to do it with. For surely
they are as tired of all that as of white, yellow, white —
nothing but white — films; and heaven knows I am.

Robert Herring.

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A LETTER FROM WALTER WHITE

(Secretary of the National Association for the i\dvancement of Colored
People, author of The Fire in the Flint and Flight, both novels of negro
life, as well as much research work in negro social problems.)

As a result of the successful use of Negro themes in the
American theatre and the acclaim which has come to Negro
artists in the theatre, on the concert platform and through ^
the work of Negro novelists and poets, there is now beginning
to be seen a considerable activity in the world of the cinema
with Negro life as the material used. Four of the biggest
cinema producing companies in the United States are at
present at work on Negro pictures. One of them, '^Hearts
in Dixie' \ produced by William Fox is to have its world
premiere to-night.

From what I have heard of all of these pictures now being
made none of them reaches a very high level either of
interpretation of Negro life or honest presentation of genuine ^
Negro material. All four of them are of the minstrel show,
'*Befo' de war", type. That, however, does not seem to^
me important. With the vast amount of race prejudice in
America and particularly because the producers of moving
pictures must depend upon a nation-wide distribution which
includes the South, it is almost imposible to start off with l^^

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the piesentation of anything" but the old stereotyped concepts
of the Negro.

Perhaps in time we may evolve to the pinot where moving
picture producers and distributors may have intelligence
and courage enough to utiHze the excellent material
contained in some of the more notable novels written about
the Negro by Negro and white writers during the last few
years.

Frankly, I am not hopeful of this for some years to come.
Perhaps the only way such a picture could be done probably
would be through its production by a European company
and then brought to America with the accolade of a European
success precisely as Krenek's "Jonny Spielt Auf" recently
gained some attention and success in the world of opera.

If you care to do so you might run this letter as a short,
hasty and, I fear, far too inadequate picture of the possibilities
of the use of Negro material in the cinema.

Walter White.

A LETTER FROM PAUL GREEN

I am very much interested in your proposed number of
Close Up, to be devoted to Negro art for the cinema.

There is a great field for exploration here and especially,

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now that the phonofilm is an actuality, will the richness of
Negro life — mime, song, dance and picturesque background
— have a full chance to be exposed to the world, the white
man's world as well as the Negro's. It will, of course, be
some time in coming to fulfilment, but sooner or later it will
be, and I for one welcome such signs as this given by your
magazine. You say in your letter that your number will be
devoted mainly to Negro writers and their views on the sub-
ject, accompanied by stills etc. Such a number ought
to be of tremendous interest. As a w^hite man who has done
some writing on Negro subjects, I wish to congratulaltj you
on this move. I shall look forward to seeing the number.

Paul Green.

(Mr. Green is the author of In Abraham's Bosom, and other Negro
plays).

THE AFRAMERICAN CINEMA

The negro is not new to the American film. The late Bert
Williams appeared in a film before the war. But this did
antagonism. It was the film of the Johnson-Jeffries fight
not get very considerable circulation due to Southern
that thrust the negro out of films and created the interstate
commerce edict against fight films. Sigmund Lubin pro-
duced all-negro comedies in Philadelphia before the war.

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The negroes themselves have been producing pictures on the
New Jersey lots, deserted by the white firms that migrated to
California. These companies have starred actors like Paul
Robeson and Charles Gilpin in white melodramas like Ten
Nights in a Barroom. White impersonations of negroes
have been very frequent, either in farces or in the perennial
Uncle Tom's Cabin. Negro children have in the last years
been appearing in such slapstick films as Hal Roach
perpetrates with his tedious and unconvincing Gang. The
treatment of Farina is typical of the theatrical (variety and
film) acceptation of the negro as clown, clodhopper or scare-
crow, an acceptation which is also social. No objections
have been raised by the solid South to Farina's mistreatment
by the white children (to me a constantly offensive falsehood
and unpardonable treachery of the director), nor to Tom
Wilson's nigger-clowning.

The present vogue for negro films was inevitable. The
film trails behind literature and stage for subject-matter.
There has been a negro vogue since the spirituals were given
their just place in popular attention. ]\Iany negro
mediocrities have ridden to glory on this fad. ]\Iany white
dabblers have attained fame by its exploitation. The new
negro was suddenly born w^th it. CuUen and Hughes were
crowned poets, but Jean Toomer, a grea,t artist among the
negroes, has not yet been publicly acclaimed. He first
appeared before the hullabaloo was begun. The theatre
took the negro up. First Gilpin and eventually came Porgy.
Now the film. Sound has made the negro the big thing "
of the film-moment.

Of course, the first negro film in the revival had to be

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Uncle Tom's Cahin. I praise in it the gaiety of the first
part and the friendly, unsupercilious treatment of the negro
and the general goodwill of the actors. I condemn in it the
perpetuation of the clap-trap sentimentality. This is not the
day to take Harriet Beecher Stowe too seriously. Uncle
Tom's Cabin should have been produced as folk-composition,
or better not at all. It is not important as matter or film.
Sound is bringing the negro in witl>-a sort of Eastman
Johnson-Stephen Foster-Kentucky Jubilee genre, or with the
Octavus Roy Cohen-Hugh Wiley crowd satisfiers, where the
negro is still the nigger-clown, shrew^d sometimes and butt
always. And Vidor's Hallelujah with a good-looking
yaller girl. As for me, I shall be assured of the white man's
sincerity when he gives me a blue nigger. I want one as
rich as the negroes in Poirier's documents of Africa. I am
not interested primarily in verbal humor, in clowning nor in
sociology. I want cinema and I want cinema at its source.
To be at its source, cinema must get at the source of its
content. The negro is plastically interesting when he is
most negroid. In the films he will be plastically interesting
only when the makers of the films know throughly the treat-
ment of the negro structure in the African plastic, when they
know of the treatment of his movements in the ritual dances,
like the dance of the circumcision, the Ganza. In Ingram's
The Garden of Allah the only good moment was the facial
dance of the negro performer.

The cinema, through its workers, has been content to
remain ignorant. It might have saved itself a great deal of
trouble and many failures and much time had he studied the
experience of the other arts. Well, what can the negro

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cinema learn from The White Man's Xegro and The Black
Man's Negro in art, in literature, in theatre?

Graphic art : The Greek and Roman sculptors of black
boys were defeated because they did not study the structure
of the faces. In modern art, there is Georg Kolbe's fine
Kneeling Negro. There are Annette Rosenshine's heads of
Robeson and Florence Mills — elastic, lusty miniatures. And
there is the vapid, external, gilded negro by Jesper in the
Musee du Congo, Tervueren, Belgium. Compare. If you
want to see how a principle can be transferred and re-
converted, see what the late Raymond Duchamp-Villon
learned from African sculpture. Relaxation among angles.
Study Modigliani for transference to another medium. In
painting examine Jules Pascin's painting of a mulatto girl
and Pierre Bonnard's more stolid negro. But always the
source : the sculpture of the Congo, the Ivory Coast, the
Gold Coast, the bronzes of Benin, the friezes of Dahomey.
Observe their relation to the actual African body, coiffure,
etc., to the dance. What do you deduce?

Literature : In America I know of but one white man's
novel that has recognized the negro as a human-esthetic
problem— which he must be to the artist — and not either a
bald bit of sociology or something to display. I refer to
Waldo Frank's Holiday, This eloquent though monotoned
book is not a bare or ornamental statement of the inter-race.
Its concern is not with the culmination of the tragedy in the
lynching, but with the relationships involved. The horror
and the sacrifice of the lynching are certainly unavoidable,
but greater and above these are the relationships, and the
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act. This is the one book I know of that has recognized the
entirety as ukimately human relationship, which determines
the aesthetic unity. There is not in this book the
ethnographical-archaeological-sociological preoccupation that
obscures the major motif in the other books. This is a
novel, it is art, it is distillation, condensation, purity.
Shands, Stribling, Peterkin, Van Vechten all strive to
reveal their intimacy with the details of life and vocabulary
of the strange folk they present. Shand's Black and White
and Stribling's Birthright do free the central motif from a
number of these interferences, leaving a clearer path to the
culmination. But the motif should determine the book,
which it does not in either case. Peterkin wishes to be
genuine (but to be genuine is not to be unselective) and
sympathetic and impartial. This makes her work a less
questionable enterprise than Van Vechten 's Nigger Heavenly
the conscience of which must be severely doubted. Black
April is better than Green Thursday, The former obscures
the relevant data with data on folk-idiosyncracies. It is the
artist's business to evaluate the relevant data that he may be
better able to know its potentialities, and not to record every
detail contributing to the formation of that material. Green
Thursday indicated no sense of the potential m^aterials, their
convertibility and relevant form. They were dark waters
poured into Hamlin Garland jugs or Mary Wilkins-
Freeman ewers, taking the form and conveyance of the
receptacles.

Theatre : The film may find instructive analogies and
sources in three plays : Earth by Em Jo Basshe, Porgy by
the Heywards and The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'Neill.

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Earth is an instance of a play with a concept in its theme,
but no recognition of that concept perceptible in the
language or human-arrangement of the play. The theme
was meant to articulate the struggle with the negro between
paganism and Christianity. Instead it is a struggle of
personalities we witness. The theme indicates what the
negro film promises in the way of experience, when the
philosophic cinematist will be present. Porgy is more
immediate indication. It lacks all concept. It lacks
significant intention. It lacks a valuable narrative. Its tale
is that of Culbertson's Goat Alley and the old white melo-
drama— the wicked man, the lured girl, happy dust, the
cripple, sacrifice, vengeance. But its virtue is folk, always
a good source. It has caught the folk in its rhythm and
whatever idea the pla}^ possesses is in this rhythm. This
" rhythm as idea " makes of it a better play than Torrence's
Granny Maumee, in spite of the latter's effort to convince us
of folk authenticity. The tragedy of Porgy is no more
important than the tragedy of Goat Alley, It is rendered
more poignant simply because it has taken place in a folk-
structure to whose rhythm the individual participants
contribute. That is why the character of the crab-vendor,
suggested by one of the actors and inserted into the completed
play, does not obtrude. It is of the total folk-structure and
easily finds its place in it. In the Theatre Guild production
the play failed as a rhythmic unit, leaving us to enjoy, not
the entity, but the details. This may be due somewhat to
breaks in the authors' construction. The authors and the
director failed to sustain the rhythmic counterplay between
Crown's sacrilege and the Negroes' religion in the hurricane

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scene. This was a play meant to be produced not mimetically
but choreogTaphically, and moreover — as folk — to be
stylized. It laid too much stress on a bad story, the songs
were not intervalled with precision, and — most serious
of faults — the diction was stereotype. This last, of course,
has nothing to do with the production, it is the authors'
weakness. The authors confess they did not take advantage
of the original Gullah dialect because it would be incom-
prehensible to an audience not familiar with it. Should
Synge have avoided the Gaelic on the same score? Synge
exploited, and converted the difficult speech, suiting it to the
language of his audience, which was his language-medium,
and attained thereby a tremendous eloquence. Any author,
- intuitively gifted and philologically and rhythmically aware,
could go to the documents and records of a Gonzales, a
Bennett or a Reed Smith and re-create a diction at once
original, relevant, convincing — and comprehensible. Yet
Peterkin and the Heywards, operating in the very environ-
ment of the dialect, could do nothing with it but run away
from it. These immediately foregoing words are full of
meaning to the negro film with speech.

Coming to the negro talkie, we can find no more complete
entrance than by way of The Emperor Jones. In itself The
Emperor Jones is not particularly negro. One may question
the thesis of atavism which runs through it, as one may easily
deny the too patent psychology. But it is excellent theatre,
a theatre of concurrent and joining devices. It is, in fact,
better cinema than theatre, for its movement is uninterrupted,
the uninterrupted movement can be borne only by the film
and screen, for the necessity of changing the sets obliges an

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interruption in the theatre. There is a central motive of the
escaping- Jones. The theatre has not the capabilities to
reveal the textiiral effects necessary to the drama, such as the
increasing sheen of sweat on the bare body. Here is your
" photogenic " opportunity I The theatre can never equal
the cinema in the effect of the gradual oncoming dark, also a
dramatic progression in the play. The ominous and fright-
ful shadows, the spectres of the boy shot at craps, the
phantom galley — the cinema has long been well-prepared for
these. And now the sounds. The play is dependant on the
concurrences and reinforcements of sounds. The sounds
are part of the drama. The drumbeats, the bullet-shots, the
clatter of the dice, the moan of the slaves, and the recurring
voice of Jones, his prayer — what a composition these offer
for a sound-sight-speech him I This is the ideal scenario
for the him of sound and speech. Here silence enters as a
part of the speech-sound pattern, and becomes more impor-
tant than ever it was in the silent film I Here one can
construct counterpoint and coincidence, for there is here
paralleling of sound and sight and their alternation. There
is intervaling, a most important detail in the synchronized
structure. But all this does not end The Emperor Jones, It
must be negro ! How? We can switch back to my earlier
words : The negro is plastically interesting when he is
most negroid . . . The negroes must be selected for their
plastic, negroid structures. Jones should not be mulatto
or napoleonic, however psychologic requirements demand
it. He should be black so that the sweat may glisten the
more and the skin be apprehended more keenly. He should
be woolly, tall, broad-nosed and deep-voiced. The moaning

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should be drawn from a source in the vocal experience of the
negro, the medicine doctor's dance from a source in the
choreographic experience. But beware I We do not want
ethnography, this is no document. I am not asking for the
insertions of Storm over Asia; I am asking for a tightly
interwoven pattern. The sources are only sources. Folk,
race are not complete in themselves. Dialect is not an
aesthetic end. I am not asking for the duplications such as
Langston Hughes writes. We shall have enough of these
and they will be nothing but records, and records lacking
even intelligent selection and commentary. What I have
said in my remarks upon the negro in art and literature will
indicate what the ideal negro-film must not be and must be.
The documentary film is ethnographic. The documentary
film is a source, but even in a document one cannot place
everything and there must be concessions to the form. In
the constructed film of the negro, the art-film let us say, the
problem will always be, not the negro in society, but the
negro in the film. The problem will not be that of Edward
Sheldon's The Nigger, filmed years ago with William
Farnum (Fox Film The Governor) . That sort of play in
reality omits the negro, just as A DolVs House actually gave
us no woman but a thesis. We are, I hope, far away now
from films about the black peril " — although The Birth of
a Nation is still with us and " the yellow peril " is a constant
offering. The problem of intermarriage and inter-race is
not likely to be honestly dealt with on the American screen
for a long time, but I do not complain of that — the problem
play has generally been dull drama, it would be even duller
cinema. When the cinematists have shown that they have

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intelligently examined the negro as subject-matter, that they
know a great deal about him and his experiences, then the
problem film of the negro can be attempted, for the problem
will be comprised then, and only then, in a complete ex-
perience of a people. It is indeed reassuring that literature
in dealing with the negro has become more sympathetic.
The sympathy, however, has not extended as yet to the
formal material, the convertible raw stuff — it is humanitarian,
and that is good. But in the humanitarian sentiment one
still detects considerable patronage, indulgence, condes-
cension and an attitude hardly judicious, that of the
examiner of an oddity. In the documentary films of
Burbidge and the Cobham journey, the captions are
frequently supercilious, and in a document of a polar trip,
a bit of non-documentation is perpetrated for humor : a
negro hand runs off scared upon seeing a polar-bear, safely
bound, hauled upon the deck. These Caucasian evidences
will persist a long time and wherever they will persist, there
will be no proper attitude towards the negro as subject-
matter.

Then is the hope in negro films turned by negroes ? That
would be a hope, if the American negro had given evidence
of caring for and understanding his own experience
sufficiently to create works of art in the other mediums. But
the American negro as graphic artist has shown very little
awareness of this experience ; as writer he is imitative,
respectable, blunt, ulterior and when he pretends to follow
negro materials, he does little more than duplicate them.
Of course there are exceptions. The exceptions, I believe,
will eventually create the rule. But that rule will be created

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only by artists who are strong enough to resist the vogue
which would inflate them. We are now entering into a
vogue of the negro film. Perhaps when that is over, the
true, profound, realized negro film will be produced, and
perhaps negroes will produce them.

It will have been observed that my preoccupation has been
constantly with relationships. I have been preoccupied with
relationships only because they are constantly present. The
relationship between the African dances and the sophisti-
cated Charleston and The Black Bottom is unavoidable, the
relationship between native negro song and jazz is evident.
We are always what we were : that is perhaps a platitude
but it is also an important truth for the negro film. It
suggests a synthetic film, a composite film, in which the
audience's experience of a girl by Tanganyika becomes the
audience's experience of an^idolized Josephine Baker. Folk,
race dominates the world. There is a theme. And the
movie with its devices for simultaneous and composite
filming offers the opportunity. Someone might similarly
make an incisive film deriving the hooded Ku Klux Klan
from the leopard-skin-hooded vendetta of the black Aniotas
of Africa. In that way lies penitence for The Clansman
which became The Birth of a Nation.

Harry A. Potamkin.

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OF NEGRO MOTION PICTURES

The traditions of" the American stage became the
aphorisms of the American screen in so far as the Negro was
concerned. With the single exception of David Wark
Griffith's colossal spectacle — The Birth of a Nation — Negroes
until very recent times were used on the screen only to
provide atmosphere as servants or savages or both according
to the requirements of the locale. As a spectacle Griffith's
production was aw^e-inspiring and stupendous ; but as a
picture of Negro life it was not only false but has done the
Negro irreparable harm. And no wonder, since it was taken
from a puerile novei, The Clansman, sl book written to arouse
racial hate by appealing to the basest passions of the semi-
literate.

The success of Porgy and Blackbirds^ probably w^as the
stimulus which hurried Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Fox into
the production of all Negro pictures. I would like to think
that the masters of Hollywood have suddenly come to the
realization of the wealth of drama in Negro life, but this
appears too good to be true. Surely, Hearts in Dixie, a
talking picture recently released by Fox, justifies no such

* Which just completed a year's unbroken performance on Broadway.
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high hopes. Even aside from the crudities which appear to
be inherent in all of the so-called talkies, there is no real
sustained story — only a series of more or less related in-
cidents. However, there is one redeeming feature — the
rich resonance of the Xegro voices in speech and in song
prove that in the field of the talkie " they cannot be
surpassed. Of Hearts in Dixie, Robert C. Benchley,
dramatic critic of the New Yorker, and former dramatic
critic of Life magazine, writes in Opportunity — a journal of
Negro Life — for April : " It may be that the talking-movies
must be participated in wholly by Negroes, but, if so, then
so be it. In the Negro the sound picture has found its ideal
protagonist."

Traditional racial attitudes in America have proven a
tremendous obstacle in the way of those whose creative
instincts lead them to see the beauty and pathos in Negro life.
Motion picture producers will hesitate long before they
attempt anything in the nature of a new evaluation of the
Negro. America is conservative to the point of reaction
when it comes to ideas — especially ideas on the so-calle
race problem. Therefore, it is probable that the screen wil
follow in the paths of least resistance, for on that path the
box office lies.

It would appear that the history of the Negro in America
might provide a rich source of dramatic material for treat-
ment on the screen. Surely, of all the racial groups which
make up this roaring democracy, none have sustained such
an unremitting and colorful conflict with the forces of their
environment as the Negro. From the time the first slave

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ship anchored off the coast of Virginia in 1619 until the
present hour, the Aframerican, as he has been facetiously
designated, has been the most persistent insoluble in the
chemistry of Americanization. As a result, around him
have whirled the mightiest forces of American life. He has
been the cause of bitter strife — the genesis of devastating
conflicts — the source of endless speculation and perplexity —
and the origin of much of the humor which is labelled
American.

In the exploitation of Negro material the screen has
lagged behind the stage — and the stage has been inexcusably
tardy. For fifty years almost the stage adhered to the Uncle
Tom tradition. When the Negro was dramatized, in-
variably he was a simple, old retainer of the Uncle Tom type
with white, woolly hair and a quavering voice, extolling the
virtues of Missus and Massa; or he was an ignorant,
improvident scamp of the Topsy genre, although this was
sometimes varied by the use of a black villain in order to
I provide a suitable object for the exaltation of Nordic
' supremacy.^ Even these characterizations were seldom, if
ever, interpreted by actual Negroes. White men in black
face, after the fashion of the once popular minstrel, were
selected to depict Negroes. And as a rule they were just
about as accurate in their portrayal as they were real in their
/racial delineation. The use of Negro themes interpreted by
^ de facto Negroes is comparatively new to the American stage.
It followed in the wake of the remarkable performance of
Charles S. Gilpin as Emperor Jones in Eugene CNeill's
'play of that name. That Negro themes are capable of
successful and stirring dramatic treatment, and that Negro

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casts can intelligently and sometimes brilliantly interpret
these themes can now be attested by the success of Paul
Green's In Abraham's Bosom and DuBose Heyward's
Porgy. And the number of plays*, dealing with various
phases of Negro life which were produced in New York this
season, indicate increasing popularity of the Negro play and
the Negro actor.

Hallelujah, directed by King Vidor, and not yet released,
may prove a surprise. It may be to the motion pictures
with sound accompaniment what Porgy has been to the
American stage. Vidor will have everything — robust and
resonant voices — the panoramic sweep of great plantations,
white with cotton — a carefully trained and directed cast —
everything. He will only need a story. Will he sweep
aside outworn traditions and get it? Aye, there's the
rub."

This does not imply that there will be no Negro films.
On the contrary, the talkies " present a magnificant
chance for the development of short comedy reels wherein
the happy vagaries of Negro life can be depicted with in-
cidental singing and dancing and the fun making
propensities of Negro characters portrayed with profit if not
with accuracy. But only a motion picture impressario
endowed with exceptional courage will attempt to film a great
epic of the Negro in America — or will dare to find in the
heroic struggle of this unfortunate people the universal
human attributes of mankind. And unless he finds these
things — easy for the unprejudiced eye to see — he will never

* Goin' Home. Black Boy.

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attain that height of artistry, the basis of which has been and
must always be truth.

Elmer Anderson Carter,
Editor,
Opportunity Magazine,

A Journal of Negro Life.

Address : 17, ]\Iadison Avenue — 10th floor,
New York Citv.

BLACK fanfare

Lying in de jail-house.
Peeping through de bars,
De cold rain a-falling,
And — de —

I don't care how you orchestrate it, on a hundred boxes or
a hundred silver trumpets, I want a fanfare to welcome the
negro film,

I want more than negro actors in negro films, I want more
than the negro's vision of the negro ; I want the negro
exhibitor who will give us the negro reaction to passionless
whites through selection of current releases, I want the negro
critic.

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Judgment's a-coming, Judgment's a-coming,
De dark's guine kiver from sho' to sho' :
And de angel wid de trumpet say times no mo'.

For judgynent substitute awakening,

Xo longer a colour but a people I Art directors worked
on the principal of "black women and blue wine" ; greased
g'lintings of majestic torso; black faces and white pearls and
red lips. Kaleidoscope turned gently to guard against the
spontaneous, to ensure the colour pattern. Till in Yvette
Cavalcanti tore off the black skin like a cloak, and gave it
to the Hessling to wear.

Hallelujah, hallelujah I Kingdom and Race. Hallelujah !
The tremendous fact of starting all over again, with no
ghastly traditions.

Hoii) come dis? Film journals are not the place for
enthusiasm and uppitiness ; beyond that, enthusiasm is
dangerous for critical balance. In the first stage to excuse
bad acting, the conviction that the film is worth while being
cherished before it is unwound, it is hailed as quaint custom.
When the critic sees his first batch of negro films he is sure
to slip up, just as he did with the early Russian productions.
Never mind all negro creative work, in dance or in stone,
■stands security for LIFE in the negro film.

]\Ir. Robert Herring in a brilliant article, published in one
of the most important English newspapers, pleaded with
film producers to find their material in everv walk of life.
He said, "It is impossible to read in the paper that 'two
hundred workmen have been rendered idle as the result of the
closing down of the Cum Duffryn Colliery, Port Talbot,

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without seeing that there is drama behind it." But then the
cinema in America and England is dominated by — dare I use
the wretched word? — the "bourgeois." Russia had to give
us the drama of the workman's life; men like Eisenstien and
Dziga-Vertoff who class themselves as workman, and
sympathize and feel with workmen. Tell the average
American producer that he is a workman and he will not be
pleased ; he is manufacturing for a middle class market and
is graduating himself from the worker's class, a would-be
bourgeois ! He looks round at the new world, at his
neighbour catching the eight-fifteen train, at the thousands
following dictates of good citizenship ; he is impressed bv
respectability, but the instincts of the showman tell him that
it is not entertainment. On the other hand the negro lives
richly, even his prayer meetings become as intoxicating as
a dervish dance. Julia Peterkin's Scarlet Sister Mary
depicts the passions and tranquilities, the robuster plays of
Paul Green are filled with the blaze of emotion, the moments
of semi-madness. Negroes need simply to live on the screen,
while you cannot re-live morning bacon and eggs unless in
the vein of satire which Jacques Feyder displayed in Thou
Shalt Not. The point is that Feyder did not pillory himself,
that the bourgeois fay cannot mock himself, but that every
negro can be himself ; that there is only one Feyder in a
thousand (the genius who is not bound by laws and
inhibitions), but that there are plenty of negroes.

Apart from the intense interest of the one and the utter
boredom of the other, there is theoretical proof of the
superiority of life to the artificial as screen material. Time

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values of life are always progressive ; we change from minute
to minute, our circumstances change, the same things may
happen to us again but they must have a new significance.
Without time values incidents make bad cinema . . . Ivan
Moskvin in The Postmaster is hurled into the street again
and again ; the doors fly open once more to spill out
unfortunate Ivan, yet nothing new is being impressed in
time, there is no mental building up. Second, third and
fourth precipitations are meaningless however pretty the
composition in space, (the snow falls). Having harrowed
us with the sight of Ivan collapsing on the pavement after
the violence of ejection (the snow keeps on falling) the
director believes that he has merely to repeat the circum-
stances, without development or elaboration, to create the
emotion.

In constructing a story time values are nearly always
forgotten or ruined, in transcribing life there is no chance
of falsifying these values. Of course the scenarist may
reserve the right of selection, although he is forbidden
construction ; he may mass situations but not impose them . .
First game therefore to the negro film !

For the benefit of the sceptical, who will point out that
I have chosen to illustrate my point with an antiquated and
obscure picture, I will quote a typical bourgeois super. Does
any reader remember the care that Frank Borzage took in
Seventh Heaven to establish the seven flights of steps ? The
camera followed Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell from the
entrance hall right up the stairs to their attic (I believe that
the camera was stationary, the set rising on a lift ; half way

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between each storey the camera would have to mix. This
would require careful matching, but would not be as difficult
as it sounds). The path of romance leading up from the
gutter to the stars! Notice, dear reader, the "bourgeois
way" ! The spectator had plenty of time to study the steps,
he could not very well forget them, he saw that they led from
landing to landing, he may have counted them to pass the
time . . . Chico dies. Diane imagines her dreams false, and
so her love false. Never in this type of picture. Here is
Chico pushing his way through the crowd, while the hands
of the clock press on to the sacred eleventh hour. "Diane,
Diane !" Long shot down the stairs. Hon' come? This is
a spiral staircase ! Collapse of the dramatic moment !

The mind, functioning in space, accepts the shot down the
spiral stairs on account of its striking, if hardly original,
composition ; but the mind, functioning in time, rejects it as
preposterous. And this is what they do in a super I

It is depressing to dwell on these old-fashioned pictures;
think of every second super and recall the happy endings
which give distorted retrospection. A film must be a unity,
it must be judged by what you think of it at the end; and
the enormous kissing close-up, for the fade-out, contrives
neatly to shatter time values.

Glancing back I am appalled to notice that I started with
spirituals and finished with Seventh Heaven; there must be a
moral somewhere.

Hearse done carried somebody to de graveyard.
Hammer keep a-ringing on somebodv's coffin.

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

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LONDON AND THE NEGRO FILM

While Wardour Street has been warring with Fleet Street
as to the originator of the unusual film movement the London
Polytechnic has unaffectedly been creating a metier entirely
its own. It has established a reputational rather than a
repertory cinema that gives us, as if by the workings of a
consistent policy, the life of the humanities that dwell on the
outer edges of modern imperialisms.

Sometimes the fare has been straight travel stuff like
South'' and the African missionary film they showed early
last year. At others a more or less slender thread of narrative
has woven the plain 'interest' and 'occupational' stuff into a
dramatic unity. This was done with "Nionga" (which the
Poly gave us about two years ago), with "Chang" and with
"Zeliv". But no matter in what form the film presented has
been made, it has always held a subtlety of charm which
reveals an intelligence behind the choice of subjects by the
Polytechnic's officers that deserves our thanks as well as our
congratulations. If it has been straight travel, it has been
straight travel with the something else, the something
dift^erent which separates it from others of its ilk. The
camera seems not only to have picked the salient architectures
or the picturesque views but has clothed them in a delicate

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fabric of humanity, the iiumanity which after all is essential
to, is part of and go with them, but nevertheless is only too
often left out.

If the film has been of the kind through which a thread of
drama runs it is true that absolute naturalism suffers slightly
as a consequence, but as in "Chang'' and particularly in
'^Nionga" the dramatic moulding was never obtrusive
enough to parody the natives' psychology and rob us of their
naivete and simple charm which has always drawn us to these
films as a relief from the sexual saturation of the white man's
drama.

A point of paramount importance to the moment is that the
Poly has been making box-office successes of these films to
the extent of record runs. Besides being several times
recalled, "Chang" at one of these periods ran nineteen
consecutive weeks. This is proof to the world that in London
alone exists a large white public interested in the life of his
coloured brethren.

It is not without a tinge of sorrow, one feels that in staking
another chip on pre-releasing European's "Under the South-
ern Cross" the Poly has, save for pictorial and photographic
beauty, missed its metier.

The film is based on a Maori legend telling of the
endeavours and their consequences, to unite the warring
tribes of the Ariki and the Waitai into a single powerful unit,
the mise-en-scene being the grand and exquisite environs of
the volcano Rua-Taniwha.

As the Maori is not a negro in the strictest sense, his
presence in the May issue, perhaps, demands an apology.

128

From Zelvc, the Zulu film, shown at the London Polytechnic.

Under the Southern Cross, a film of the maoris made in the environs
of the volcano Rua-Taniwha. See article London and The Xegro
Fih)i in this issue.

Photos : Courtesy of High Commissioner for Xezc Zealand

Stephin Fetchit in Fox's Dancing, Singing and Dialogue Picture,
Hearts in Dixie.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, the first venture in Hollywood to star negroes,
with James B. Lowe as Uncle Tom and Gertrude Howard as Aunt

Chloe.

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But as he is more negroid than anything else a certain
interest that attaches to him as a victim of the white man's
schemes for expansion may not after all put him quite out of
bounds.

Throughout the film we are given the customs, the arts,
and the frenzied dances of the two tribes, but all this fails to
give us the intimacy, a sensitive appreciation of the dawnings
of mind in these primitive children as did *'Nionga", or as
was particularly exemplified in ''Chang".

In *'Nionga" the cruelties and torturous practices of the
natives took on new meaning and human importance. Out
of superstitious beliefs that had been preserved simply
because they had continued to serve them well, had grown a
tradition, a crude morality, a preparedness of the individual
for self-sacrifice — even to death by burning — for the benefit
of the tribe. Incomprehensible to most of us of different
experience and different knowledge, no doubt, but no more
incomprehensible than the cruel proscriptions and persecu-
tions of our day will be to future generations.

But in '*Under the Southern Cross" details of the natives'
practices and customs have been taken and pieced together
upon a framework of screen conventions. The significance
of the *'tapu" — an important thread in the theme — is
negatived by the introduction of an hen-pecked male, to cite
a single deviation, who is pulled by the ear for ogling
lasciviously at the owner of a pair of heaving but comely
hips. A phenomenon, by all the signs, he witnessed at
least once every day of his life and, therefore, one which
would occasion no sudden interest even if his mind w^ere free

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from the powerful influence of the tribal "tapu". Such
direction cannot fail to put a false value over the whole film
nor escape the inevitable consequence of reducing the
granduer of the surroundings to mere decoration. Quite
possibly the inspired source of such tampering is alike
responsible for the Maori self-consciousness before the camera
when registering an eroticism quite different from its habit.
The simplicity, the charming indifference to the camera is
gone, there is instead the self-awareness of very inferior
screen actors possessed of an intelligent grasp of what every
crank of the camera handle means.

Although the film is thus robbed of one of its most
attractive ingredients, some pictorial moments, at least, are
saved to us. There stands out particularly the scenes when
Patita paddles across the lake in the dead of night to keep
secret tryst with Miro who, as a pending bride, should, in
accordance with the *^tapu" remain confined to the '*tapu
hut'' where eyes of love may not rest upon her. With the
exception perhaps of a bunch of moonlit glistening ponies
in *'Dracula" never has the screen given us the eerie
visibility of night so beautifully free from artificiality. A
still from these sequences w^ould have been a treasure, but
such treasures were not to be unearthed in Wardour Street.

No amount of pictorial perfection can however, remit the
unpardonable sin of tight-lacing saga and primitive folk lore
into the already insufferable form of the white man's screen
conventions. To prevent this sort of thing it will, probably
for the first time in history, be possible to count on the box-
office returns as an ally. Such is the peculiarity of appeal in

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this type of film that the hybrid offspring of such methods
as, it seems, are now beginning to be applied to them, will
not only have lost their raison d'etre but with it the very
power to attract sufficient numbers to balance the box-office
ledger.

Hay Chowl.

ELSTREE'S FIRST "TALKIE"

At midnight on Friday, June 22, in This Year of
Grace, 1929, the w^orld's greatest talking picture made its
bow to the jaded journalist at the Regal Cinema, Marble
Arch, London, England.

Personally, long before I went, I knew it was the most
magnificent talkie ever made. A fortnight had elapsed
without us having a *^ greatest ever," and the event was
about ten days overdue.

So Blackmail, British International's first full-length
talkie, made at Elstree, had an auspicious premiere. Even
the poor critic received an invitation to refreshments after-
wards. That, of course, constitutes the all-in-all of the
English trade show.

Strangely enough, the times were not otherwise out of
joint. No comets had been seen for some months, despite

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furious trunk calls by the Elstree Press department ; no new
stars had been discovered. The Copernican theory was
unaffected by the event. Einstein, speaking relatively,
is said to have regarded the affair as being of na(
celestial importance, although it has been suggested in
certain quarters that Mercury's eccentric orbit veered slightly
towards the Earth that night.

There was the usual jam, of course. At least one critic
arrived, after a desperate stud hunt, to find that the best seats
were filled by friends of the men who trimmed the spotlights,
maiden-aunts of the supers who appeared in the artisticall)'--
focussed backgrounds, or travellers for the firm who hoped
to reap a fortune from the bookings of the masterpiece.

There was a hush in the air. Time, particularly when the
show was twenty minutes late, began to drag very slowly.
After a grinding of needles and flickering of backcloths we
were treated to an ''acceptable programme fill-up " in which
a gentleman in evening dress informed a lady in ditto ditto
that he was hers for ever and for aye, a fact which w^as
repeated a number of times during the singing of the lengthy
ditty.

The audience applauded politely, and adjusted their ties
for the more serious dish awaiting them. General managers
and company promoters were observed to fidget, small part
players were getting excited, assistant cameramen were ready,
elbow advanced, to point out their own particular close-up to
their admiring relatives.

One critic looked at his watch and yawned.

When it was all over the process was repeated. The Press

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maintaining the reputation Paramount has just given them
in that direction, crowded to the Lounge, which looked like
the Battle of Hohenlinden. In the background were the
waitresses, like the Iser, rolling rapidly.

Flashlight photographers did their stuff, the Elstree stars
obtained a due meed of publicity for waiting up half the
night, the men who once walked on in a picture made fifteen
years ago wrought havoc around the refreshments, the ladies
who supply the loungers in our cabaret sequences grabbed
the sandwiches.

A dozen critics looked at their watches and grabbed taxi-
cabs.

^ ^ ^

And so to Blackmail. Alfred Hitchcock had finished the
picture at the time the talkie wave broke. Frenzied con-
ferences resulted in his re-shooting most of it and making it
into a dialogue picture.

It must be said at the outset that, considering that he was
toying with a medium about which we knew nothing,
considering he had a finished picture to doctor into a talkie,
considering his star could not speak English and had to be

ghosted " throughout, he has made a good job of it.

Blackmail is perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound
and silence we have yet seen. It is not a great picture, it is
not a masterpiece, it not an artistic triumph, it is not a
valuable addition to the gallery of the world's great films, it
is not even, I think, a great box-office picture..

But it is a first effort of which the British industry has
every reason to be proud. It is Hitchcock's come-back.

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While seeing it you can hardly believe that it was made by
the man who gave us Champagne or The Manxman.

For perhaps the first time in the history of the commercial
cinema we are faced with a good film based on a dreadful
play. Usually, however low the stage, the screen can be
depended upon to go one lower.

As is usual in the more serious Hitchcock pictures, all
considerations are secondary to the Almighty German
Technique. If you shoot up a stairway you must tilt your
camera until the result looks like Gertrude Stein reduced to
a cross-word puzzle. If you want to show a Flying Squad
car in full blast you begin by showing a revolving wheel and
draw away until you run parallel to the car. Very clever, of
course. Yet Hitchcock has a way — at his best — of justifying
his weaknesses.

The first reel is silent. The dialogue is in arithmetic
progression with the speed of the picture. The story, which
is too thin from the commercial angle, and too inane from the
artistic, concerns a detective in the Flying Squad whose girl
murders an artist who attempts to seduce her. He is put on
the case, sees she knows something about it, keeps back his
evidence, and is blackmailed by a goal-bird- He rather
cleverly succeeds in making a suspect of the blackmailer who,
releasing his record, runs from the police and is killed
through falling through to the Dome of the British Museum !

The girl, by this time, resolves to confess, and goes to
Scotland Yard, where the detective, returned from turning
over the corpse, tells her everything is cleared up and butts
in very effectively on her confession. The last we see or hear

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of them is their laughter as they talk to the policeman on
reception duty.

An altogether inconsequential theme for a good picture.
Yet. Hitchcock succeeds in wedding sound with silence. He
has one sequence which, despite the way it has been glorified
in the English press, gives one a clear idea of the poten-
tialities of the medium. The girl overhears a chatterbox
discussing the murder, w^hile the memory of the knife is
still fresh in her penny-dreadful mind. The talk dies down
and down until only the word knife " emerges, stabbing,
hurting.

Inasmuch as that particular sequence is about the only one
w^e have on record in which sound has been definitely
instrumental in the development of the drama, the picture is
worthwhile.

Hitchcock's Cockney humour adds to its appeal. A scene
in the Underground Railway, satirical sequences in a Lyons
Corner House, an altogether delightful portrait of a char-
woman by Phyllis Monkman, give the film a vividness which
makes it fascinating. A remarkably clever study of a C.I.D.
man, played by an ex-detective, is a delight to watch. It

passed without comment in the Press.

^ ^ ^

Within twenty-four hours of the show being over, the
optimists w^ere predicting an immediate revival in British
production. Blackmail has put us on top of the world.
Pudovkin is dead, Eisenstein has ceased to be. Even Carl
Laemmle, a greater figure than either, is forgotten for the
moment !

We shall see- Hugh Castle.

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COMMENT AND REVIEW

IN THEIR INFANCY.

Now that a few months have elapsed, and please note that
it is only a matter of a few months, it may be less indiscreet
to tell of an early British effort to make a talkie.

The cameraman nearly fainted when he found that he
would have to shoot through glass, and he moaned about
distortion and fuzziness. When somebody mentioned
paning he just cried. The sound expert was distant, he
asked the cameraman if he had ever heard of a glass shot.
In reply he got : for a glass shot the glass is at least twelve
feet from the camera, and optical glass is employed. The
sound expert had provided PLATE GLASS, w^hich is
greenish. The cameraman turned his handle — after
refusing all responsibility for the negative.

Would you not have thought that the cameraman and the
sound expert would have talked things over before they
attempted something which was at the time quite new ?

Good old British films !
. In those early days the sound expert had it all his own way,
people were too new to the game to say him nay, and the
photographers were taking close-ups with a six-inch lens !

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One of the most amazing sights . I have ever seen was the
removal of jambed film from a synchronized camera. The
motor, which also worked the sound recording apparatus,
had been powerful enough to keep the handle grinding to
the end of the shot : and the timid cameraman, although he
had heard suspicious noises, had been too frightened to
speak and spoil everything for a false alarm. Any hard-
working conjurer who had every taken pride in removing
coloured paper from a boy's mouth would have crept away
to shoot himself.

O.B.

HANDS.

We arrived early for the projection of a film and somebody
else was running through an American two-reeler.

Miss Stella Simon's ballet of hands is in three movements;
prelude, variations, and finale. By hands alone, by hands
against black backgrounds, by hands against white back-
grounds, by hands moving in constructivist scenery. Miss
Simon has attempted. Hands are massed in the corners of
the screen, hands reach down into the picture, hands slither
at the fringes of the screen, hands glide, undulate, dance
formally. Pas de deux ; fingers flirt, meet, caress. The
screen is divided into odd figures. From behind shimmering
curtains, HANDS.

We feel the experiment to be of interest. Why cannot our
amateurs attempt instead of busying themselves with

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comedies and dramas? (See the amateur page in any popular
film journal). Miss Simon should be encouraged to re-make
with her empirical knowledge. For instance we suggest that
it was a mistake to move the dancers behind the constructivist
ridges, it made us conscious of the people behind the hands.
The background could be moved effectively, or the camera,
or the hands themselves are at liberty to reach up and out,
but the dancers should forget all but HANDS.

We were pleased and surprised that Miss Simon has not
favoured double exposure. There are no tricks on the films
apart from justifiable prism shots at the finale.

A short with a provocative beauty.

O.B.

FRAULEIN ELSE.
Directed by Paul Czinner.

Good evening. Miss Bergner ! Good evening. Miss all-
dressed-up Bergner ! All dressed-up and seven reels to go !

Sorrow will do something to the Bergner. The pearls,
the hair, and the hands are very nice, but sorrow may give us
the woman; at least it will be a present for the actress.

To jump to where the film should start but does not ; the
evening when the Bergner has to approach Albert Steinriick
because her father, Albert Bassermann, has crashed on a
phoney speculation. And Albert Steinriick and Albert
Basserman because Schnitzler is so far only a name on the
credit titles.

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She has been snubbing the financier. She and he.
Elizabeth and Albert. She and he; sorrow with promise of
more to come. Her father pleads; begs; begs her to
approach the financier friend for a loan. But you have read
the book, you are interested only in seeing the way she tries
to ask a man she has snubbed for the loan of a small fortune.

He turns, he sees her, she walks in the opposite direction.
He turns to catch her following him in the corridor, in the
cocktail bar, in the lounge. What is it all about? And the
mother at home runs for a doctor. The father will be
arrested ! fear brings on a fit. He lies panting on a bed.
The crumpled collar has been thrown on the floor. Tele-
phone to my daughter. She will help me. A vision (such a
dreadful vision !) of the Bergner leading her father across a
bridged ravine.

After the vision the Bergner goes to a dance. She ought
to go to the cinema to forget her troubles. She would love
films if THAT vision impresses her.

A flower on the shoulder of a gown, a twisted handkerchief.
Her father will have the monev bv mornino^ if .... . But
you have read the book, you are interested only in seeing
the way she tries to live up to the vision, that dreadful vision !

The film, as I have already said, should have started here;
then, if Mr. Czinner had still felt it absolutely necesary to
show us the ease and pearls of her home life, he ought to
have cut back. Things happen so quickly, when moments'"
must have seemed hours of torture to a girl about to run
naked into a crowded gambling room. To be driven to an
act of folly, the pearls, the hands and the hair would have to
begin to hate themselves.

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. .The book conveyed the cHmax of each moment, this film
Icould have done it by re-grouping of material, by flashing
hack and breaking up. The sense of oppression going on
and on. Pick up a cloak, throw off a cloak in the gambling
room, throw off a cloak to stand naked before the man who
considers that a price.

There is a fine handling of big scene, of the springing to
horror of the great hotel like a maiden aunt visually out-
raged in the rue de Lappe.

„ The page-boys, the porters, . the retired army gentry
whisper the tale in corners. It might have started here, and
cut across; network of words, thoughts, deeds.
. It is told far too stolidly !

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

PARIS SHORTS AND LOXGS. '

We fell out of the Cinema des Agriculteurs in Paris after
we had seen Passion and Death of Joan of Arc for the
second time, expecting any minute to be urged on by
attendants armed with extra-spikey maces. After our mind
had been so cruelly bullied we resigned our body.

The flies tortured Joan !

It was a prologue, in our evening, to a programme of
shorts. Mechanical music throbbed with the same intensity
during a nature film about fish. We waited for a Dreyer
close-up of a fish shedding tears !

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Festivals of short films are quite everyday occurrences;
the French have an appetite for documents. We found
Shangai too long, yet it was made with more thought than
most topicals. The casual way it was joined together in-
dicated the casual way one gets to know a city. Claud
Lambert did good work ^Yith Void Marseilles ; although a
great deal of credit is due to the town, and the architects
who designed it, and the boats which pleasantly grimed it
with smoke, and the men and women who achieved such
dangerous looking corners.

- In Togo, P. Marty has made a touching little attempt at
Pudovkin cutting. He recapitulates all that he has said by
flashes, giving the certitude that he wants to demonstrate
his position as a jetine cineaste rather than drive home any
moral.

^ These films," somebody will ask us, are they very
important ?"

•i- A great many of the new French shorts are not, but then
do you, or do you not, want to be in the movement?

- Souvenirs de Paris, by Duhamel, is boring, but it is classed
as avant-garde because full use is made of a silver mannequin
halating in a modiste's window, and there is a ride in a
metro. (See Herring in Close Lp, Vol. IV. No. 5).
Duhamel has made another short called Paris Express, this
is owned by Studio Films, the excellent and courageous
group managed by Pierre Braunberger. We have nothing
but honeyed adjectives for everything that this group stands
for. However, may we be allowed a few prejudices?

: Rythme d'une Cathedrale, by R. Landau, has titles super-
imposed on the film itself ; generally echoing the image with

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a tautological bang. It is quite amusing to travel about,
and up, and round a cathedral while sitting in a seat, and we
are getting acclimatized to the avant garde trick of turning
the camera to pep upon ordinary scene ; nevertheless, it
could have been so much more. We are no poet, but the
rhythm of a cathedral might be to us a Viking sea
thundering round the ears, or etcetera.

We thank the language for that etcetera for w^e hate to
criticize, still we definitely do not like shots which say,

Come here and look we would rather potter by ourself
in the sun and nose bits out. And there might have such
beautiful imagery in the titles !

Vie Heiireuse is a happy document on the plage. ''An
indiscretion says a title. The sunshade and two legs.
Yes, but two men !

And how they hissed and shrilled cat-calls ! The private
showing of Deslaw's Parnasse at the studio 28 was excep-
tionally exciting. The old, old streets seen diagonally, the
old close-ups of old dolls, the old play w^ith advertisements,
but quite a new and vigorous reception from the audience.
They would stand for a section of Parnasse's celebrities,
hoping to see themselves, but the rest of the picture they
hailed as the bunk.

The oppression of the day before; due to Dreyer's
insistence, was forgotten ; the merry spectacle of jeune
cineastes hissing was worth the pilgrimage to Paris. We
wished we could have taken them on with us to see Renoir's
Tournoi. They would not pass in sedate silence the
moustaches and beards that look as if they had been cut out
from the nursery rug. (A knight in armour who wants to
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sit down for a second's rest must have been amusing even
to his contemporaries !) In spite of the costumes from the
local theatrical dealer jeiine cineastes would certainly admire
the lights on the chess-board floors, and the white plumes
streaking out against grey clouds.

Nobody in the movement " would dare to laugh at Chien
Andaloii, a SURREALIST film by Bunuel. We were
scandalized into attention at the outset by a close-up of an
eye being gouged out by a razor. We were told that this
scene was taken in a slaughter house . . . The man dressed
in peculiar garb, suggesting the child combined with blinkers
of a horse, rides down the street on a bicycle. He collapses
outside the woman's house. She takes him in, and unlocks
his tie and collar from a box he wears across his chest.

It is difficult to follow threads consciously which are meant
to appeal to our subconscious. We bridge over to symbols
for purity, and homosexuality, but so much effort is spent
in making the bridge that we cannot catalogue.

We recall the man looking from the window at a boy in
the street who has lost a wax hand. The boy cannot move,
in a nightmare, a car runs over him. The man consoles
himself with the woman. He rubs her breasts and the shot
dissolves to the woman nude, then to the woman's buttocks.
She flies from him. He tugs at a rope to follow. Attached
to the rope are two grand pianos and two parsons lying flat
on the floor.

The woman manages to close a door on the man. His
hand is caught. Ants swarm over it.

The woman makes-up her lips ; ants swarm from the man's
mouth.

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A friend helps him by standing him punitively in a corner,
a bible in one hand, a school-book in the other. The friend
is shot ....

This picture means something individually, and we hope
that the Film Society will give us a chance to see it for a
third time, for we would go up to twenty times to review a
real SURREALIST production !

O.B.

THREE RUSSIAN FILMS.

Dziga Vertoff's Man with a Movie Camera. In Paris.
Can we see it ? Naturally. And would you like to see The
Eleventh Year and UAppetit Vendu?

Thus we were received by Mr. Carlovitch, who looks after
Russian films in Paris, and we want to thank him specially
for his great courtesy and kindness.

The Eleventh Year opens with shots from an aeroplane;
rocks and sea drifting by. Mines. Three lines of move-
ment; men and lorries on a road, bridge, and under an
archway. That is so careful there must have been a reason
for taking us up in the air. Ah ! we are going under the
ground. Humping up into the skyline a hillock, belted
with machine band of workers carrying lanterns and picks.
We are going under the ground. The flapping mouth of a
coal scoop swings by us. We had to go up into the air to
realize what it means to go under the ground. Above the

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black and white smoke from the furnaces a giant miner
hammering; time that is passing but not time that is lost.
These men are working for their own ideal (whether we agree
with it or not), working for a land of new codes. There is
something fine and beautiful, caught chronographically in
the sweat gleaming arm of a stoker ; indeed these machines
do not ask for our opinion.

The screen is split horizontally into two long-shots ; one
moves away, the other is static. It is magnificently done.
Men walking home; away from the mines but the ideals in
their homes. They are building an electric station for their
state. The black and white smoke is building. (Women
and children in the hay fields are building by releasing men
for the more skilled work). There are no obstacles to the
willing ; rocks are blasted to black and white smoke ; smoke
that builds.

Waters of the river rise to augment the electricity ; rise by
means of constructed dams. The town is seen under water ;
the one unifying idea- Windmill is seen under water
(You remember the still?) The village that has set out with,
one purpose; any village of the new order.

It is surprising how long we can watch, how long we can
watch the women making hay and the electrician climbing a
telegraph pole with knives clamped to his boots. Perhaps
we are already taking a personal interest in the village?

Then we see the factory chimneys through the corn, in
case w^e forget the linking-up. Factory chimneys are them-
selves a corn field, with black and white ripples of smoke.

A ballet of telegraph wire (you remember the still ?)
suggesting the work inside the factory. ^

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We must not forget, either, the activity under the ground.
Pit ponies are as sturdy as the heavy rafters in the roof.
Change of camera angle makes the rafters wrench with the
ponies, drawing the eye to the quiet workers as the beasts
draw the loads. And the lifts go up, to emphasize the men
who stay below.

We leave them with a man with a drill, it brings vitality
and truth to the abstract arrangements of the avant-garde.

Women at the pit-heads lustily wheel away the trucks.

A sub-title says, The flag of Lenin Courageous
workers hidden in masks. So the flag of Lenin is a bright
shower of sparks. No silk to drape across L^topia of ease
and content; something searing, dangerous and alive.

Watching over the workers, the sentinel.

Wake of a boat, taken romantically from sea level.
Sailors. A head and rifle against the cylinder curve of a
waterfall. One picture one turn shot of the sky gives
shredded clouds.

A sub-title says, The Flag of Lenin Light from

the home and the clubs. The flag is always light, light to
kindle or to welcome: never silk.

We build ^d^ith golden light. That is the message of the
picture. Streaked fingers of light sweeping over the
factory floor. Bars of red hot metal, and coiled metal
shavings doing things one finds in the work of Bruguiere.

Men marching up skyline, up the hillock ; and smoke from
the factory chimneys balancing the corner of the composition.
Where there is no smoke the tripod is tilted to give balance.

It is grand propaganda. We are quite impartial but only
a stone could remain unmoved. The machinery and men

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working in harmony for something which they beHeve to be
better. " Towards sociaHsm says a title. The factories,
the women, the children. " Tow^ards a world socialism ",
says a title. The art of the director does the rest. Final,
clashing chords of a symphony. There it is, whether you
like it or not.

The Man with A Movie Camera is lighter than The
Eleventh Year. M. Kaufman is again the operator and
Swilowa again helps w^ith the cutting.

Berlin and Rien Que les Heiires! Forget all that. To
begin with here is a Russian typewriter. Russian customs
and habits, that alone puts it apart. Then there is a freedom
from the usual smirkiness. The birth of a child is shown
without the coyness of Nature and Love. Birth and death
are being contrasted ; the face of the mother is cross cut with
linen face of the corpse; the mother's twitching lips and
nostrils, the calmness of death. It is brought out that
death is terrible and birth a conquest. It would be a joy to
any new woman, not a shock.

Forget the other documents, for Vertofif has the idea of
making you conscious of the camera. The lens racks out
and in, the scene comes into focus ; the lens racks out and in
and the eye of the cameraman is in the lens. The eye of the
camera, the eye of the cameraman, and the eye of the camera
recording it all.

We w'ere reminded of a scene in The Postmaster, w^here
the daughter is dressing for a party in front of an oval mirror
which the cameraman frames in the black circle of an iris :
another mirror, the mirror of the screen.

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An accidental effect; Vertoff's are minutely devised. He
stops the film at a certain point to show a photograph of the
film, cutting to a joining girl at work on the first copy.
Rolls of the scenes we have just seen glint from the neat
shelves. A woman driving along the streets, petrified to a
single frame in the film strip of the woman driving along the
streets. Long shot from the roof of a house ; a camera pans
down into the picture. A cameraman climbs a girder. We
see him taking a picture, we see the picture he has taken.
We are frightened for his safety and frightened for the safety
pf the unseen cameraman. Astral projection of self!

The film is different ! A doll in a shop window; so, so
threadbare. Vertoff catches shadows from a tree outside
which put breath into the china throat. Shutters, and views
through the slats; so, so threadbare. Vertoff cross cuts
with a young lady blinking sleepy-dust eyes; eyes open and
shut in a twinkling, slats twinkle.

Vertoff's first reel is devoted to people entering a cinema;
to the projectionist threading up his apparatus ; to seats in
the cinema being occupied, one by one, by invisible patrons.

A girl is asleep. There is a ring on her finger. Wind
stirs in an empty cafe. The cafe where she gained the ring?
She sleeps. Children sleep. Down-and-outs sleep. The
town sleeps. They all have a right to sleep.

The cameraman sets out for the day. He stretches himself
across a railway line. There is a thrill as the train swoops
down. The woman still sleeps.

The streets are washed, the girl washes. A relaxation for
the cameraman. Not for long. He rides on a fire engine.
He finds an attractive fountain. Because we are constantly
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reminded of the camera we cannot complain of the contrived;
for instance, of the way in which the fountain is turned on
a moment after it is discovered by the eye of the camera.

As in The Eleventh Year there is a good deal of footage
devoted to factories, light splashed tunnels of miners, and
great chimneys blowing smoke rings.

We come back to the morning streets. Hand of police-
man, hand of motor horn, in lightning cuts; mixed first, with
the lens of a camera, then with a gigantic eye. .

Finally, we watch the audience, watching the screen on
which are scenes we saw being taken by a cameraman whom
we knew was being himself taken by Yertoff's Debrie. The
montage is stupendous and leaves most of the accredited
masterpieces in; some vague category with the Asquith
person. The propaganda, without the stern beauty of The
Eleventh Year, is a little too stormy, the contrasts between
the wealthy woman enjoying a manicure and the manual
worker being obvious and tiresome. -

The work of Vertofif is no longer legendary. We have
seen it, others have seen it. Everybody must fight till they
do see it !

L'Apetit Vendii is what Henry Dobb called a custard-pie
melodrama. We began by wondering, " Will the Russians
laugh at this.?"- Two men after the girl in the cafe, giving
musichall twiddles to their hats and canes. Does this amuse
Russians? The poor man wants to marry the girl . . . The
scenario livens up when a millionaire, with bad digestive
organs, offers the poor man a sum down for his stomach.

Every kind of garnished dish is offered by Folies-
'Bergeresque girls to the re-stomached capitalist. The

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worker, meanwhile, is taken ill mysteriously in the train.
He hangs out of an open door, managing to lodge his feet
pretty firmly.

Exercises and doctors fail to alleviate his pains. He
attempts suicide. The girl hopes to revive his interest in life
by forcing him to return to his old occupation, that of a bus
driver.

Four men crowd into a telephone box, the bus charges
straight for it. Pedestrians dive into a fountain, a police-
man continues to direct the traffic with his head half out of
the water.

The peculiar end of it all is that the bus heads into a wall,
the driver is killed and the capitalist dies at the same moment.

We understand that the picture has been booked for the
Vieux-Colombier, we hope that some of the French critics
may be able to tell us if it is a comedy, satire, tragedy,
propaganda or WHAT? With the trade papers we can
merely call it good entertainment,

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

LA CHUTE DE LA MAISOX USHER.

After we had seen, and loved, Finis Terrae we could not
rest until we had visioned " La Chute de la Maison Usher.
Owing to the enterprise of Mr. Stuart Davis the picture will
be brought to London.

Clusters of candles burn in the halls of Usher, candles
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that get outside the oneness of the picture and light it again.

The man picks up a guitar to still the draperies that billow
out from the passage windows, to stay the books that float
in unearthly motion from the stacked shelves. Excellent
use of slow^ motion to create atmosphere. The music is un-
heard and the sounds of the house unheard but the poetry of
it, and in it, is felt. That is something so much greater.

The candles are ever in the forground, if they were
extinguished one believes that the screen would blacken.

A visitor for the House of Usher. The damp greyness
of the sky and the screen is as a sheet of blotting paper.
One could crumple up those pools and clouds. The castle
itself a model, matching in badly with the exteriors.
Visitors' feet (it is not our fault that directors are obsessed
with feet) seek the castle. Puddles to be skirted, something
to do besides watch the feet.

Murk and gloom in the blotting paper landscape.

Candles and through them a paint-brush. Has the hand
painted the candles to light the hand painting the woman ?
Artistic composition is so cardinal, so exquisite, one finds it
hard to believe.

The driver of the coach is riding away, and we want to
see what is happening to the visitor. Good dramatic com-
position.

He sees the portrait of the wife, the portrait which lives
while the woman (Marguerite Abel Gance) dies, the portrait
which drains the life from her.

CofiEin with flowing white draperies. Candles double
exposed, draperies, doors round which white lace flutters,
lake to be crossed, with unearthly candles and flowing

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draperies. Here is a real understanding for douuble ex-
posure, it is poignant. Nature takes part in the funeral.
Leaves sweep out of a door.

In Seize et demi Onze, an early and bad Epstein from a
story by Marie Epstein, Van Daele drives along a road close
to the sea with Suzy Pierson, while w^ater is super-
imposed in different absurd manners ; but in La chute de la
Maison Usher super-impression has a Mary Butts' quality;
the drapery in the candles fanned by the wind and the flames
of the lace. Mystic intenseness.

Not one nail,'' says the man, "must be placed in
coffin."

He is led from the cave and the hammer falls.

Stars in the- sky form a cross. Storm. The house of
Usher is to perish. Cross of the sky marks the grave of a
race. A night for the dead, a night for black magic

The magic, be it black or white, belongs to Epstein.

We scribbled these notes on the margin of a synopsis;
we do not intend to enlarge on them because every Close-Up
reader must go himself to see.

O.B.

EROTIK.

Manuscript and Direction by Gustav Machaty.
Photography by W. Wich.
Sets by Borsody, Machon, Hackenchmied.

A production by Von Stroheim's assistant, with the title
Erotik! -_. -

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. Although it is not a talkie we can say^ That sounds
good."

Young man (Olaf Fjord) gets stranded on a railway
station. The station-master (S. Sleichert) invites him into
the house to dry himself.

Rain against telephone wires, drip in pool, a last corpulent
drop on the window pane. Rain through the night • . .
The details are clever. The young man opens his bag and
takes out a bottle of perfume, which he applies to his lips
and ears.

Struck all of a heap " the station-master questions the
expedience of perfume for young men ; whereupon the young
man produces a bottle of whisky about which there can be
no question.

:.:A cigarette is lit from a patent affair, thereby intriguing
the simple station-master. The young man presents it to
his host, a generous action which secures — and was intended
to do so — an invitation for the night.

A simple station-master intrigued by patent lighters,
harbouring a young man with sophisticated scents in his
bag, is bound to be the father of a cinema daughter, and Ita
Rina makes an attractive job of it.

The father is called away on some kind of night duty.
^. Don't," says the girl, forget anything, father."
P He does not forget to take the bottle of whisky with him.

To even things up the boy forces the perfume on the girl,
who practises with it in the secrecy of her chamber. Nobody
troubles to tell her that the name of the perfume is Erotik!
- The seduction scene is astonishingly well done. Big-
heads ; severed noses, . mouths, eyes. We are all fond of

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chocolates but we cannot eat them because they make us sick,
but Mr. Machaty uses these chocolate-box close-ups so that
they really become erotic.

The film stales. The girl's child is born dead. She
drifts to the city where the man has many mistresses.
Humour of the Menjou brand to eke it out.

Where have you been?'' splutters enraged husband.
With my lover," says the woman gaily.

The husband roars with laughter, and the audience is ex-
pected to compete as they have been allowed to see the
woman, half an hour earlier, holding out her arms to the
indifferent young man.

Machaty is soaked in Hollywood tradition (there is a
cabaret sequence) but .... there is that BUT.

This native picture from Prague was exhibited at
Stuttgart.

O.B.

HOLLYWOOD NOTES.

The Devastating Power of Gossip " has beer, awarded
the grand prize of a thousand dollars in the Cecil de Mille
prize contest for the best idea for a talking picture. The
author of this homely, yet pregnant suggestion is Marie
Loscalzo, of New York. The contest excited widespread
interest and resulted in the submission of many thousands
of ideas — each limited under the rules to two hundred and
fifty words. Several minor awards were made; two of them

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going to foreign contestants — Heather McCleary, of
Edmonton, Canada, and Spitzer Jeno, of Budapest.

* * *

The Actors Equity Association, a union of stage players,
has been seeking to unionize the Hollywood screen actors.
The attempt appears to have been prompted by the fatuous
belief that the talkies cannot succeed without the established
thespians of the stage, who have recently been flocking to
Hollywood in great numbers. The leaders of the film
colony, while welcoming these recruits to the screen, very
emphatically resent their effort to impose the restrictions of
the stage union upon cinema production. Film work has
its own highly specialized and peculiar conditions, and is
not in the main amenable to the rules and impositions
applicable to stage work.

* * *

C. Sil-Vara, the European playwright, is one of the latest
of Hollywood's acquisitions. He has arrived here from
London, under contract with M-G-M, to write talkie plays
directly for the screen.

* *

Hereafter United Artists pictures will be released through
the Paramount-Lasky distribution system. This means that
the Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin,
Norma Talmadge and Gloria Swanson pictures, as well as
the D. W. Griffith and Samuel Goldwyn productions, will
henceforth enjoy a much wider outlet than heretofore, while
at the same time Paramount's prestige will be increased.
Preceding this arrangement, plans had been under way for
a merger of United Artists and Warner Brothers; but

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mutually satisfactory terms could not be agreed upon, and
the contemplated merger was abandoned.

* * *

Three Live Ghosts is under way at United Artists studio.
The picture (a talkie, of course) is based upon Max Marcin's
popular stage play, depicting the adventures of three men
who escape from a German prison and return to their former
haunts in London, to discover themselves officially dead in
the eyes of the government. The character of the shell-
shocked Spoof y " is portrayed by the English actor
Claud Allister. The other two ghosts are Beryl Mercer
and Charles McNaughton, both of whom have also been
identified with the London stage.

^ ^ ^

The marked success of M-G-M's Broad-way Melody, their
initial talking-and-singing picture, has inspired them to a
second like effort under the title of The Hollywood Revue.
This is a far more elaborate and ambitious production than
the first, with all of the elements of popularity emphasized.
Broadway Melody, in Hollywood alone, enjoyed a con-
tinuous run of six months, with two showings daily.

* * *

Maurice Chevalier's Innocents of Paris is to be followed
by The Love Parade. This musical extravaganza will be
directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The story is based upon the
European play, The Prince Con^or^, by Leon Xanrof and
Jules Chancel, and, according to the announcement of its
producers, Paramount-Lasky, will bring a new type of
musical entertainment to the audible screen^ as well as

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optical nuances in the shape of ultra-modern settings and
unique camera effects.

^ ^ ^

The Brazilian Southern Cross Productions is one of
Hollywood's newer film companies. Its first picture, The
Soul of a Peasant, has an incidental personal interest in the
fact that its featured player, Lia Tora, of Brazil, is the
author of its story, and that her husband, Vicomte Julio de
Moraes, directed the film,

^ ^ ^

Warner Brothers' On With the Show, their first all
natural-color talkie, has proven so popular, that they are
preparing to follow it with several others done in the new
Technicolor medium. This newly developed color process
presents pictures in very soft, life-like tones, with a much
more restful effect on the eye than has heretofore been
attainable in color films. Song of the West and Gold
Diggers of Broadway are the two pictures at present under
way at the Warner studios employing this recent chromatic
innovation.

^ ^ ^

Hollywood has been advised by the Federal district
government of Mexico City, that beginning in September
no films may be shown in ]\Iexico with English titles. They
must all be in Spanish. The order makes no mention of
talking pictures; but trouble in exhibiting English-speaking
films is expected, in view of the opposition already being
waged against them, in anticipation, by certain influential
Mexican newspapers, on the ground that such pictures will

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have a tendency to induce the abandonment of Spanish in
favor of English. ^ ^ *

The announced intention of Mary Pickford and Douglas
Fairbanks to film a talkie version of The Taming of the
Shrew, has inspired other producers to contemplate
Shakespearean audible screen productions. Among them is
Cecil de Mille, who is said to have Hamlet in mind. Former
attempts in this field, with the silent films, proved consis-
tently unpopular. Which would seem to indicate that
Shakespeare, with his bare plots, minus the spoken word,

would have proven an unsuccessful scenario writer.

* * *

The suave, debonair Adolphe Menjou of the silent pictures
is to make his talkie debut in Fashions in Love for Para-
mount-Lasky. In this film he will not only speak, but will

also display his talents as a singer and a pianist.

* * *

Paramount-Lasky have engaged John Galsworthy to
write the dialog for the screen version of his Escape. Basil
Deane, the British stage producer, who will come to
Hollywood to direct the film, is collaborating with
Galsworthy on this phase of the production. Clive Brook,
another Englishman, who has already established himself

in Hollywood, will be cast in the leading role.

* * *

And speaking of Englishmen — James Whale, recently in
the public eye as the director of the London stage play,
Journey^s End, has arrived in Hollywood to join Para-
mount's scenario staff as an expert dialog writer.

C.H.

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An interesting display of old English and American films,
supplied by Mr. Leslie Wood of Apex Motion Pictures, was
given by the London A.C.A. on June 19th.

Exhibit No. 1 was a 1904 Cecil M. Hepworth one-reeler,
entitled Dumb Sagacity. This film, one of the earliest made
in England, dealt with the heroic exploits of a dog, who,
with the aid of a horse, rescues his young mistress from
drowning when the tide comes in and leaves her stranded on
a rock.

Exhibit No. 2 was a very old one-reeler made by the Cines
Company of Rome, and recounted the adventures of one,
Judith, who chops off the head of a tyrant, to the great joy of
the assembled populace. Considerable merriment was
caused by the dramatic appearance, about every half minute,
of a super-imposed angel, who apparently urged the fair
Judith to perform the foul deed. This film was made on an
out-door set, and contained no sub-titles.

Exhibit No. 3 was the great hit of the evening, a 1909
D. W. Griffith American Biograph thriller, called Her
Wedding Bell, Blanche Sweet was the heroine, H. B.
Walthall the villain, and Mary Pickford appeared as an
extra. Parallel action was used by Griffith in this one-reeler,
and suspense was worked up to a terriffic pitch, but
unfortunately the end of the film is missing, so we do not
know whether the hero arrived in time to save his bride-to-be
from being blown up by the bomb, or not. If Intolerance
tells us anything, he did, so we hope for the best.

The Mother Call was Exhibit No. 4. This was a real
high-pressure domestic drama, bringing in a drunken hus-
band, a wicked baronet who loves another, a dastardly plot

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to change babies, and so forth. The producers, the old
Kineto Company of England were apparently fond of sepia
tinting.

Last, but by no means least, we had a two-reel drama
called A Slice of Life, produced by the American Film
Company about 1910-11. Points of interest were the parallel
action, a lengthy cut-back, some excellent mixes, and the
inclusion of the names of the players. The heroine,
Winifred Greenwood, distinguished herself by appearing in
every scene armed with an enormous bunch of roses which
she distributed to all and sundry. The late Arthur Johnson
played juvenile lead.

This collection of films is unique, and credit is due to ^Ir.
Wood for obtaining and preserving them. To an amateur,
especiallv, thev afford material of great value.

A.W.

ROBERT HERRING GIVES

Four Points about Hearts In Dixie

The first and the second are Stephin Fetchit. His face,
his dancing, his personality and his voice, which I am sure
would have been very interesting if I had been able to hear
more of it. i\Iaybe the Astoria is not good on its acoustics,
maybe I was sitting too near (I found the same thing in the
corresponding seats at the Empire, where my experience of
BROADWAY MELODY was that I was dozing in a traffic

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block), and maybe that the microphone cannot do justice to
the Negro inflections, but the fact remains that Fetchit and
the others were only intermittently intelligible the night I
went. It ought not to be the recording, because Jimmie
Rodgers and a host of others come over well on gramophones.
The women were better (the two leading women were in all
ways excellent) and so were the children. It was the men's
voices that blasted, and I think the intonations of Fetchit
must be too subtle for talkies as yet.

For those who may in consequence have been disappointed
in this first Negro talkie, I would make the third point ; the
film had a sentimental enough story, and the Negroes (one
felt they were told to be darkies ") had to sing plantation
songs, but, with the exception of these songs, it all came over
so naturally and so free from hypocrisy, that one found one
was for once watching a talkie free from sentimentality, which
was very queer. They didn't call each other regular
guys " or " troupers;" they acted on it, quiet. In fact, the
casual way things happened and the Negroes went on living
their life, though it wasn't inspired, was attractive.

The fourth point. A matter of talkie technique. Fetchit
does nothing about the house, and goes off dancing when
his wife is ill. The grandfather sits up with the baby, croon-
ing to it. You hear him crooning, and through the window
you also hear the noise from the dancing, coming in. I liked
that quite. But the real success was in the scene where the
mother dies. She has been looked after by a Voodoo woman,
but at last the grandfather gets in a white doctor. The
doctor comes in, draws back the sheets and we hear him say

Why she's been dead three days! All the time we see

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his face. Then his words cut across, she's been dead
three days/' Xow in a silent him, the visual thing would
have been broken. The doctor's face wouldn't have been
before us all the time. There would have been cutting, more
or less skilful, and perhaps a subtitle. We shouldn't have
had the face held, and the voice, and then again the face of
the grandfather as he said We didn't know, we didn't
know. This was the odd spectacle of talkies assisting
A'isual continuity.

There was also, this isn't a point, just a coda, there was
also a gang plank which drew up as the ship taking a boy
away drew out, filling the screen and blotting out the old
man who saw him off. This wasn't great, but I can remem-
ber how we should have hailed it in silent days.

It was interesting to see how the audience at THE MAN
I LOA^E completely missed a similar silent point (it was one
here) because they were so intent on talking. Richard Arlen,
a boxer taken up by Baclanova, arrives at her house in a
lounge suit. Dressed in white, she says he is so late, and
he carefully says there is an hour before dinner. They dis-
appear round a corner, and next shot are coming down
stairs, she in black and he in a dinner jacket. At once the
audience murmured How did he change?" Fek very spry
at noticing, and missed something that was very akin to the
famous collar of THE WOMAX^OF PARIS. Arlen kept
his clothes in that house : surely, you Avould have thought the
implication would have been grasped?

But people are losing their picture sense in following talk.
People must be careful. . .

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HENRY DOBB GIVES

Variations on the Same Theme.

Doubtless " Hearts in Dixie " is sincere. Sincere as is
possible with the state of mind that puts the Negro behind
the floodHghts with the ball shying booth at Coney Island
and the Femmes au Plat in the Jardin d'Acclimitation. But
it is built on illusions, illusions that have enwrapped us since
the lachrymose myths of Uncle Tom's Cabin " span a
web of sobbing sympathy around an antimacassared world.

Superficially we might have advanced since the mounte-
bankery of " One Exciting Night," though Stepin Fetchit's
role in the still warm/* The Ghost Talks " is directly in the
tradition of the American Vaudeville stage and Moore and
Burgess. But the literary loud speakers of the Learned and
Reverend Dr. V^illiam Fox still shriek with a more barbaric
clangour than nineteen Blackbirds " and double that
number of Washboard Beaters that the Negro is something
to clown and weep for us, something to do his stuff as the
hamadryads on Monkey Hill. The Negro, in short, for all
his humanity, is still behind the bars of the cage, a cage
flooded with' the glare of publicity and intoned with
the " haunting strains of negro spirituals." How far are
we with our Collection Paul Guilliame, and our penchant
for Gauguin and the Benin head in the British Museum, from
this state of mind? Is our belated cult of the coloured so
removed from William Fox?

So granting that Paul Slone's film is as honest as ourselves
how far do we get? How far with such illusions? For it is
obvious that Slone has not yet emerged from that state of

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mind which conceives of the ''Hearts in Dixie " as leaning
towards open necked shirts, bandanna hats and the melodic
charms of " Old Black Joe " and " The Lonesome Road."
Whereas those who have studied the business will assure you
that they are notoriously given to Stein Bloch suitings,
Dobbs Hats, " Digga Digga Doo "and ''I Must Have
That Man."

Nor can serious consideration be allowed to that in-
discriminate ethnology, not confined to Fox Films which
embraces under the category of Negro, Australian Aborig-
inals, Pacific Islanders and blueys from St. Anns, Jamaica.

Yet there are a few kicks to be got from the film. With
coloured performers of the calibre of Stepin Fetchit and
Clarence M use that was inevitable, for despite the tinsel and
the gawdiness, the pathos and mountebankery to order of
tradition, there is such dynamism inside them, such fires to
break through that one forgets the paint and is conscious
only of the power. That volcanic energy that breaks forth in
the dance in the moonlight is flavoured with the intoxication
of the Bal Negre of the Rue Blomet, and is abbreviated by
propriety all too soon. There for once one deplored the
sound on film system. With a disc it would have been all
or nothing.

The Voodoo sequence too, despite its Pears Annual
resemblance to the Alodern Group flavour of " Porgy " has
in it a hint of reality. Such are the moments, moments made
magical by the puppets themselves, magical in spite of the
hands that dangle the strings, that arrange this pattern of
popular entertainment with its heart appeal and its sobs, its

roustabouts crooning thrilling melodies," its " beautiful

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panorama of life along the levee and in the cotton fields " (I
quote from Mr. Fox's loud speaker), according to the concep-
tion not of the negro but of the box office.

The tragedy is not the tragedy in the film, but the tragedy
of the film : the tragedy of these untainted folk strutting their
stuff to the required pattern, playing their parts as the white
man likes to believe they do. The Xegro and all his coloured
brothers are not museum specimens. Nor are thev mounte-
banks. If they are blessed with a more than human power
of music and speech, of rhythm and colour then they have it
over us mere whites. But if Hearts in Dixie " is a specimen
of coloured expression under the aegis of the White Thaum-
aturgists of Hollywood let us next time hand the whole
process over to themselves. Whether the Negro Film
Company now being initiated by Wm. Foster will suffice re-
mains to be seen. For we have tainted the coloured man and
he will find it hard to remove himself from the economic
advantage of expressing not so much himself as the fellow we
expect. Then the Stepin Fetchits will release themselves
from that inertia which is svmbolic of something more than
mere physical laziness.

Then the dawn will come and we will find that maybe
Stepin Fetchit and Charles (Buddy) Rodgers are brothers
under the skin. What a consolation I

Impressed by The Mercury Press Ltd., London, Ilford and Chelmsford.

The Avenue Pavilion

101 Shaftesbury Avenue, W.l

A GAUMONT-BRITISH THEATRE
The Home of International Film Art.

Joint Managing Directors : { i^^'
Manager - - _ _ William Baudains.
Director of Music - - ARTHUR DuLAY.

Under the Direction of Stuart Davis.

The following attractions will be presented exclusive to this theatre :

MARTIN LUTHER

The Life of the great reformer. Directed by HANS KYSER.

THE ROSE OF PU CHUl

The first Chinese picture with an all Chinese cast and direction.

SPECIAL FRENCH SEASON.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Directed by JEAN EPSTEIN.

LES DEUX TIMIDES

Directed by RENE CLAIR.

THE LATE MATTHEW PASCAL

Featuring IVAN MOSJOUKINE. Directed by MARCEL I'HERBIER.

EN RADE

Directed by A. CAVALCANTI.

FINIS TERRAE

Directed by JEAN EPSTEIN.

Buses to the Door : — Nos. la, ic, 14, 14a, 19c, igd, 22, 24, 29, 29a, 29b, 29c, 38, 39, 48, 129, 138.

News, Star, and Standard.

Continuous Performances DAILY, commencing at 2 p.m. till 11 p.m. SUNDAYS 6 — 11
Each session lasts three hours, thereby making 3 sessions per day, viz : —

2 tills 5 till 8 8 till II

MATINEES recommended for choice of comfortable seats.

A Young Society

NEOFILM

groups young producers under
the artistic and technical direction
of Alberto Cavalcanti who
directed the 3 first Neofilm
productions

RIEN QUE EES HEURES
EN RADE

YVETTE

ANDRE GIDE and MARC ALLEGRETS
Travel Picture

Voyage au Congo

is a Neofilm Production

5 3 Rue St. Roch • PARIS

Tel: GUTENBERG 35-88
Has the World Distribution of :

EN RADE— RIEN QUE LES HEURES— LA P'TITE LILY,

By a. CAVALCANTL
LA ZONE, By G. LACOMBE.

L' ETOILE DE MER— EMAK BAKIA, By MAN RAY.
ERNEST ET AMELIE, By J de CASEMBROOT.
LA COQUILLE ET LE CLERGYMAN, By G. DULAC.
LA FILLE DE L'EAU, By J. RENOIR.
BRUMES D'AUTOMNE, By D. KIRSANOFF.
RYTHMES D' UNE CATHEDRALE, By I. LANDAU.
LA BALLADE DU CANART, By A. SILKA.
LES TROGLODYTES, By M. ALLEGRET.
PARIS EXPRESS, By DUHAMEL.

I DO LOVE TO BE BESIDE THE SEA SIDE, By 0.

BLAKESTON.
BITHULITE, By P. SICHEL.
VUE HEUREUSE, By C. HEYMANN.
PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE, By A. STRASSER.
LA MARCHE DES MACHINES— LES NUITS ELECTRIQUES-

PARNASSE, By EUGENE DESLAW.
VOYAGE AU CONGO, By ANDRE GIDE and MARC

ALLEGRET.

SO THIS IS MARSEILLE, By CLAUDE LAMBERT.

La plus import ante revue francaise

de Qinema

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Chronique des disques.

Pierre MacOrlan
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Contents

As is

Cinema Unity III
The Talkie Melody
Mechanisms of Cinema
The Implications of Revue
Talking Films in USSR
Dialogue in Dixie
Author and Talkies
Sur les Ecrans Genevois
Plastic Design
Bits and Pieces .
Comment and Review

Kenneth Macpherson
H. A. Potamkin
Hugh Castle
L. Saalschutz
Robert Herring
P. A.

Dorothy Richardson
Clifford Howard
Freddy Chevalley
Paul Rotha
Orlton West

Paris Correspondents :

London Correspondent :
Hollywood Correspondent
New York Correspondent
Berlin Correspondent :
Geneva Correspondent :
Moscow Correspondent :

/Mark Allegret
\Jean Lenauer

Robert HerrIxVG
; Clifford Howard
; H. A. Potamkin

A. Kraszna-Krausz

F. Chevalley

P. Attasheva

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VoL V No. 3 September 1929

AS IS

BY THE EDITOR

What wars there are !

What a duckpond, what a chicken-run !

The panic phase dissociated but left floating — vague
rubble in a lake of rather rubbley men left floating also.

Phase of mental thumb-biting, save-me-first-ishness.

Klang, Phototone, Tobis, Movietone, Naturetone, Vita-
phone, Kinophone and how much more etcetera.

Robust, good, vowelly names to gong assertiveness. Beat
twenty gongs, raise twenty voices in dissent, and your
assertiveness is chicken-run and duckpond cackle.

Whose system shall we use? The answer is w^ho'll boy-
cott whom if we use who's who's?

The cool, collected onlooker can giggle and caw\ Men
saving themselves are no heroic spectacle. Men saving their
money somehow are. Kind of inverted heroism. Money
is their most radical conviction and they will fight for it as
for no white-haired mother. Recruiting authorities are

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offered this as a tip for the next war. Conferences at the
Hague and elsewhere illustrate quite well the point.

Yes, the sound iilm_w^ar has its heroism. Human nature
snaps back to virility when fortunes are at stake. The one
pity, perhaps, is that the motivation should remain at a con-
stantly so unresolvent level.

And under one war, as usual, another. The American
bank rate not so long ago w^as raised. You remember the
millions of dollars instant depreciation of securities that was
so many fortunes lo^st, and the next day's quick recoveries?
This may have had nothing to do with talking films, and
nothing to do, perhaps, with bankers' decisions, but the fact
remains that almost at once we heard that the bankers behind
the American producing firms were ordering cuts in talkie
overhead — orders which affected most of the big studios and
most of the big combines.

A clue, perhaps — well, let us pry !

Talkie production — had you not read it yourself — was so
cheap. We had heard it as well as read it. Fewer sets
was one of their reasons — a reason only too readily to be
apprehended. As many sets, shall we say, as 'scenes in
any three-act play. Much cheaper.

Fewer cameramen. Less film in consequence exposed.
Less montage. Less tentative in taking. Less waste, re-
shooting. The Stroheim ten-feet-used-and-a-million-scrapped
already in the history book among quaint customs of our
ancestors. One cameraman as glass encased and stolid as
the waxest fruit of a past epoch, grinding scenes of which
the four hundred feet limit of his film is only at the first
strangled sob in the heroine's speech to her sweetie.

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The newer method is a strong, silent ca$e of felt which
the appareil wears like a top-coat. This ponderous box is
supposed to make it possible to lift the camera about again.
It might have led to a recurrence of superfluous footage and
cameramen, but the weight of this 100 per cent silencer plus,
say a Bell and Howell, suggests it would be easier to lift
the Nelson column. Renewal of mobility, unlikely.

Limitation of space — another money saver. Honolulu
sprouts (or would do) in the studio now. Its balmy breezes
fanning palm leaves made by the studio hand which gently
shakes the branch. Do you remember Hungarian Rhapsody ?
Excuses if you are trying to forget it, but there, in a film
that was virtually silent, though meant as a motif undertone
for tzigane Hungarian airs, Hoffman, the great, magnificent
master, allowed somebody to shake leaf shadows over Dita
Parlo's close ups in one scene. Apart from the fact that
they were very badly shaken, the master did not trouble
to repeat them in the semi-shots. Which is just the kind of
thing that happens w^hen you take your outdoors indoors.
But you must not say this to a director of talkies. It is surely
bad enough for him, his operator, stars and staff, that all free
holidays in sunny lands are at an end. Can you blame them
if the foliage flicks like whips? But, all the same, remember,
money saved. And money saved is money earned, they say.

Simplification of method. Days now not wrecks to finish
up those supervisor-hunted, out-of-schedule shots.

Good reason's, these, for cheapness. Then why the Wall
Street ultimatum?

SLASH !" (see Cinema. August 12th.)

The answ^er might be " Slush."

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Slush, the cheat, losing men their bankers' backing. Slush,
the revenue boomerang, missing the box office by the whole
of a public's contempt.

Turn back to your Cinema.

Though, (it states) there have been wholesale claims
from the studios that the making of talking films is less
costly than that of the old silent product, this is now
proved to be an illusion, mainly by reason of the hurried
methods of the executives in the race for big names . . .
.... the balance has been heavily weighted by the high
prices paid to stage stars, big name directors, boosted
writers and famous orchestras. The eleven top-line
producing concerns have recently enlarged their contract
players by almost 100 per cent., most of these demanding
and getting colossal salaries. Paramount, Fox and M-
G-M- have swelled the total of directors by 100 per cent.
These, too, are augmented by a great number of song
wTiters, score composers and lyricists, a's well as star
musician's.

Elsewhere 'in the 'same article we read that the general cost
of talking pictures has increased by 30 to 35 per cent.

How funny it is !

High-priced stars w^U be told where to get off at." This
was what was being written when talkies began. When
every company was more or less on the verge of bankruptcy,
W'hen every resolution was a cutting down of needless expense
and inflated salaries. The talkies were going to accomplish
everything. Capturing world markets was only part of the
idea. Getting back to normal costs was going to be the first
big change. What were talking films not going to do ?

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And now, rather pathetically, rather worse off than ever
before, the big men of the west are seeing once more those
Wall Street bludgeons — maces of the magnate monarchs.
Talking pictures a flop ?

No, there is great virtue in not leaping to conclusions. In
a civilized world survival is rarely of the fittest. Talking
pictures may quite well live. And this need not be dis-
appointing, for they are not the rich relative whose every going
to rest you hope may be his last. They are, in fact, very poor.

A specialist could diagnose them, perhaps make them fit to
be the friends of man. Close Up would offer its services for
a very high fee. But that's just what they want to avoid.

Kenneth Macpherson.

PHASES OF CINEMA UNITY III

Very little, if any, attention has been paid to light as unity.
The fact that the quality of lighting or filtering in a film is
not uniform has generally called forth criticism of what
people call technique. But uniformity can be judged only
from the viewpoint of unity. Similarly, diversity of light-
quality, of tone and pitch, is the concern of unity. Technique
permits weaknesses that unity declares injurious. For
instance, take the common practice of inserting frames from

171

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an old newsreel into a film, so generally employed in war-
sequences. These portions are certainly authentic, but since
they do not participate in the quality of light or the temper
of the light arrangements, they are intrusive and unreal. The
reality of the established Hght-unity has been contradicted.^

Of course, it is possible to incorporate different light-
quahties — a variety of tones and pitches — into a single film.
It is possible to incorporate, and the incorporation is the
proof. But a film must be light-planned to achieve such in-
corporation and the alternations must be intervalled and timed
in duration in the total rhythm of the picture. I have not
seen many films that succedeed in doing this. Feyder's
Therese Raquin was a contradiction — very delicate and to
most eyes imperceptible perhaps — between the construction
of tw^o lightings not alternated nor balanced in the intention
of a single organization : German studio lighting and the
usual French interior light. In France, it is worth noting
that unities of lighting are most often achieved by men who
are originally painters : Alberto Cavalcanti and Man Ray.^

No one, so far as I am aware, has yet dwelt upon the unity
of the absolute film. I shall here only record a few
indications. The kev to the unitv of the absolute film is

^Or refer to Epstein's Six and a half x Eleven, The inconsistencies
of lighting seriously disturb the continuity of pattern and flow. Bad
studio equipment may have produced this.

2x'\nother phase of light as unity is the relation of the lighting to
the nature of the film. I include in the matter of light the tone of the
raw-stock too. Frequently the use of a brown stock is antipathetic to
the mood of the film. But in Clair's The Italian Straw Hat the stock
provides just the period color-tone which coincides with the entire
attitude of the film.

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its absoluteness. The lesson of the films of Richter and Man
Ray's first picture to the makers of films of machine
sequences should be : the construction of a suitable material.
Will not some absolutist construct the machine whose visual-
motor rhythm he is to re-create on the pellicule for projection
upon a screen ? As it is, most machine films remain docu-
ments and not completely absolute rhythms. For while the
screw and bolt of a machine are essential to its original
function, they may not serve the film. We have by
now documented enough machine movements to create an
absolute machine as material for the absolute film. It will
not, finally, be a w^orking-machine, but may take the form of
human semblance and find its source in those interesting
sculptures of the German, Rudolf Belling, where human
portraits are modelled upon machine-analogies. In the
machine film, as in sculpture, spaces between solid parts are
portions of the structural design. Belling is the sculptor who
has best used actual hollows in the total design of his
portrait.

Nothing so interferes with the unity of an absolute film
as the presence of a human figure not arranged into the entire
absolute structure. It may be true, as one critic has observed,
that the appearance of a human figure into a film of non-
human contents relieves the spectator's tension. But that
very relief is intrusion. i The absolute film of all films makes

^ In one of the most pleasing of the machine films, Deslav's The
March of the Machines, at one point a man is visible behind the
machinery. The austerity is broken for the moment and the mind
needs to re-construct the absoluteness.

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no compromise with the spectator's prejudice and habit of
mind. Its unity is its only determinant. ^

In these days unity must pre-occupy itself mainly with the
unity of compounds. Most objections to the sound fihn —
though the objectors themselves seldom know' it — are
assertions that the sound or talking film contradicts unity. In
the journal issued by Charles Dullin, " Correspondances
a writer dwells upon the nature of this contradiction. The
article is not written with the film in mind, but the view
expressed pertains to the cinema. The view is this : we are
single-minded, and compounds of our senses achieve no
singleness because one sense or another dominates. If this
is true, then a movie can be seen only and not seen-heard
simultaneously and equally. But I am not sure that the writer
is correct. Indeed, I am sure that he is not. It may be true
that we have not until now apprehended multiple articulations
because these have not been aimed in harmonized concur-
rences. It may be true that one sensory medium has been so
emphasized that it was predominant. But I think this is not

^ I have omitted certain major concerns of unity, especially important
to the absolute film. They are the direction of a movement, the texture
and the volume. I may take as an example of all three Mme. Dulac's
Arabesque. The texture and the movement here are not sustained nor
are they patterned exactly. The play upwards of the water-hose annoys
the forward horizontal movement, and, because it is a concentrated
slender force occupying only a portion of the screen inter-
rupts the crystalline texture occupying a major part of the screen. The
use of the woman as part of the Arabesque intrudes two distractions :
one of a human subject not sufficiently impersonalized into an objective
detail, and of a detail differing in volume or solidity. But this
Arabesque was offered by Mme. Dulac as a tentative in design endeavor-
ing to utilize a variety of details. It is most instructive.

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absolute or unavoidable. To create an operative unity in the
cinema certain cares will need to be taken.

If the writer referred to above is not entirely correct in his
assertion, still within his statement there is discoverable the
point of view for the compound him. The compound picture
will need to be preconceived on the basis of one sense. That
one sense will in itself be no simple sense. The film is not
simply a visual medium : this needs to be said again and
again. The film is visual-motor. The rhythmic pattern of
the sound film will be conceived, as is the silent film (ideally),
upon a visual-motor graph. Time and space are its structural
elements. Upon these bases are imprinted the emphases of
pitch (light sound), distribution (color-values, sonal tones),
etc. Time and space, visual-motor fundaments, determine,
however, the placements of these emphases. They colnprise
within themselves : scale, duration, alternation, counterpoint,
simultaneity, climax . . . The film contains also elements
that are visual and that are visual-tactile (textural), as w^ell
as — in the sound film — those that are sonal ; but these elements
must be submissive to the visual-motor. In this way, may I
call for Mr. Betts? The film remains a film — but that isn't
really so very important. i What is a more important cosmic

^Mr. Betts still waxes courageous against the sound film. What he still
attacks is the stupid uses of the sound fi'm to date and the unjustifiable
suppression of the silent film. And shews thereby he condemns the com-
pound film. When suddenly he says : They (the Russians) are experi-
menting on different lines and putting sound in its proper place, as an
adjunct to the film instead of the film being an adjunct to the sound."
Then Mr. Betts is in favor of sound properly used? He goes on to
entomology, with that cute irrelevance of English thinkers : "If the
fly as it moved on, uttered a little squeak, do you imagine it would
become more of a fly in consequence? Xo, it would become more of
a nuisance." Is Mr. Betts implying that the silent film is nuisance
enough? -i y -

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implication is that man may be on the verge of experiences
that, though they are multiple in their origins, will be singu-
lar in their apprehension (by man).

Movement : that, we are told by the cinema critics, is the
key to the nature of the film. Or it is visual drama. Another
will say : dynamics. And still another : fluid rhythm. In
brief, all of these characterizations are both too generic and
too fragmentary. Movement yes, visual drama certainly,
dynamics indeed, fluidity and rhythm positively. One con-
tains the other and all are but terms until we re-associate them,
separate the association into its several functioning parts
(parts, that is, that are immediately usable). It is best, there-
fore, that we set down first several simple laws to clarify the
nature of the terms.

The authentic perception of movement, to quote Jacques
Dalcroze, is not of the visual order, but of the muscular order.
(Visual-motor).

Movement is not succession of motions. In cinema move-
ment no motion may actually take place, but an interval may
occur, an interval of time, between two images and that is
movement too. In other words, movements are two : the
actual movement of a body, and the constructed movement
attained through time and space-successions (in montage).

The movement of a film is not cinematic unless it is plastic.
There must be balances and contrasts. Repetitions, repeti-
tions in variation, the progressive deformation of a
theme " : altogether rhythm, which practicably includes :

Time, space and pitch durations :

Of a scene, of a sequence.

Of an image, of a tone.

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Mr. Matthew Josephson, an American writer and erstwhile
film-enthusiast of the late Broom/* saw in the American
western film his ideal of film-movement. This was an
enthusiasm generated by the French dadaists, and it is still
being uttered in England — as yet, a decade behind in its film-
judgments — by a writer in a weekly periodical. The movement
of the American film has been movement, it is true, but the
movement only of an object and not of the integral film. To
clarify my meaning, I should like to refer again to Carl Dreyer
and Jeanne d'Arc, Mr. Dreyer believes now that in the latter
portion of his film he should have graded the bold images
in first, second and third plans : the head first, then head and
torso, then full body. This may have reduced the dramatic
psychological attack upon the spectator which was so power-
fully effected by the succession of first plans, but — and this
is a first rule of a unity ! — the film and not the spectator,
determines the structure of the film. The succession and
alternation of first, second and third plans are part of the
aesthetic organization of the film, its plastic, rhythmic move-
ment. Dynamics is just another name for the climacteric
construction and organization of these various elements. It
refers to the accumiulative forward march of the film. The
drama refers to the narrative source (the literary experience)
which the spectator receives in its final converted form
through the repetitive, alternating, varying procession whose
elements I have briefly considered above. There is no single
kind of motion, no one sort of dynamics, no only form of
rhythm, no one and only category of film.

I have thought it necesary to consider, if only for a moment,
these inclusive film-terms to protect the film from the glib

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repeaters of old phrases who wouid circumscribe the cinema
with these phrases. I say here that it is the creator of films
who tells us how many kinds of films there are, and not the
critic. Indeed, the studious and serious critic of the film will
never say, on looking at Jeanne d'Arc, as did one young
American journalist, that though that film moved him
strongly, it w^as not cinema, which is, according to him,
naught if not the movement of shadows. Again, you see, a
rudimentary observation inflated to a final determinant.

The most casual observation of motion in the film should
have indicated to the glib }'oung commentators that the
capture on the negative of a thing in motion is not the ultimate
of cinema motion, A reference to the physical basis of
cinema and to the final organization of the positive for
projection should have elucidated the principle that the film
is not merely a report but a construction. In the introduction
to " Filmregie und Filmmanuskript/' Pudovkin attacks the
viewpoint of the turning " of a film, " the shooting.'' A
film is built, he says. This building is vxontage. Montage
is the construction of the unity. As such, it is no mere
assembling of film-strips, but is pre-conceived in the initial
conception of the theme. The montage is worked towards
from the beginning, just as in the final act of montage, the
entire film from its first definite expression in the film manu-
script is included. Therefore, there is a montage of the
manuscript. So long as montage is understood as an
inclusive creative (constructing) unity, it is the valid vantage-
point of film aesthetics, but the moment it shifts to the mere
job of cutting or, as it frequentlv appears in the work and
utterances of the Russians, a device for effecting the spectator,

178

From the ^leschrabpom film 120,000, directed by Chernyak. The
profile belongs to A. Orlivoy.

From Spying. A Wufku Production. Author-Operator : M.

Kaufmann.

The best film ul the (..t'orguin Cioskmprom : JIis^o. iJirector : X.
Shegepaya. Operator : V. Kereselidge.

Caba, produced by the Goskinprom, Georgia. Directed by Taurel.
Theme : The struggle against drunkenness among workers.

CLOSE UP

without regard to the level of the theme as experience, it is
contradictory of unity.

The motion picture has been too occupied with the spec-
tator. This shifting of the concern from the intrinsic film to
what is fallaciously called communication has been one of
the chief causes for the non-establishment of a film unity.
It is true that a film is meant to be experienced by some one
other than the creator of it. But experience — the systemic,
ideational experience of art — is never a product of the inten-
tional effect. That is a consideration out of the intrinsic
work. But if the artist is faithful to the highest demands of
his subject-theme, as articulated in the construction, ex-
perience is the result. That is purity. That is unity. That
is the aesthetic as against the rudimentarily psychologic,
which, in the film construction, is a physical attack. The
film, on the whole, remains no more than a physical attack,
and the talking film, as it is produced to-day, has further
lowered the level of this physical attack. The view of film-
making as effect makes for passive (even apathetic spectators),
the view of film-making as the strict realization of the intrinsic
makes for active, completely participating spectators.

The film, because it does not dwell upon itself, does not
realize itself. In all lands it disdains idea. Therefore, it
does not achieve complete conversion into a final form, there-
fore does not achieve unity — hence not the experience that is
art. The entire mind of internationalism, whether it is the
large sale of the American commercial viewpoint or the
propagandistic reduction of the Russians, thwarts this pene-
tration of the intrinsic theme and its re-making into the form
of the film. The film to-day, only very, very seldom attains

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to more than a manner or a style — an aim discarded by every
serious and earnest artist as spurious, specious and non-
propagating — and almost never to form, which is the unitv
informed constantly by the thematic-philosophic intention.
Without this intention, of course, there can be no form.

Unity, more than ever before in the history of the film and
the history of mankind, challenges the consciousness of the
artist. The film is aHve at the very moment when the mutiple-
unit is being attempted in painting and in literature and in
music (in the realm of the mechanical), when artists are en-
deavouring to create entities of diverse utilities. Very little
more than simplisms have been achieved through these
endeavours, for an alien attitude prevails, an attitude which
still is worried about effects, which thinks of purity as
reduction, and the conglomerate as the inclusive. It is time
a criterion was established, for without it the artist wallows
in a morass. The experience of the artists in these mediums
should prove most valuable to the artists working in the com-
pound cinema. That literature, painting or drama is not the
cinema does not mean that literature, painting or drama
cannot by their experience clarify the intention and method
and viewpoint (philosophy) of the cinematist. Not exclusive-
ness, but inclusiveness, is the valid mind for the artist.^

^ I read that the olfactory film is an actuality, as is the tactile and the
stereoscopic. The conglomerate mind is working. Confusion !
Several months before the natural vision film was shown in America
I heard from Spoor of the Essanay Company as to the depth film they
would soon be urging on a public too easily persuaded. I saw, as I
had already suspected, that those commercially interested in this three-
dimensional movie would never recognize that it was a distinct form
needing considerable study, and not another realistic effect. To take a
hint from painting, perspective as a means of simulating reality has been
a betrayal of painting. Perspective as a device for plastic organization
is a major utility of painting.

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To provide a basis for his film's unity, the film-maker must
select his relevant sources and select from them. Is the
French absolute film the source for the Dutch and Belgian
artist ? Compare the work of a Kirsanoff (a Russian, French-
tutored) in Mists of Auhimn with Joris Ivens' Rain (which I
saw in Amsterdam, before its final mounting) and of which
the idea and continuity are the work of M. Franken, Rain is
the purer of the two because it is less troubled by effecting a
mood upon the spectator, that is, it is less sentimental. Yet it
creates a sense of the persistent melancholy. In Rain there
is detectable a temper which, if it is perceived by the Dutch
cinematists, can be further extended into a permanent Dutch
cinema attitude. Contrast this temper with the perpetrated
mood of the Kirsanoff film and you will detect in it the un-
sentimental perception of a uniform tone in a definite
condition of nature. If this germ can be placed into the
apprehended experience of the Dutch people (as the film will
reveal), Holland will create an autochthonous and original
cinema, contributing richly to the experience of the world.
That the Dutch cinema-adventurers have felt the necessity for
working with the indigenous life of Holland is whispered by
the presence of the film made by Franken and Ivens,
Breakers. But strangely, what the phototechnician Ivens put
into Rain, is not discoverable in Breakers. And Franken,
who directed the film, did not understand that the mere
statement of a relationship is not the relationship. By simply
stating the relationship of the three persons and the analogy
with the dunes and sea — and not developing this relationship
nor this analogy by insistence upon the evidences of sea-
temper or the numerous other opportunities afforded, the sub-

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ject lacked assertion, fullness and culmination. The analogy
demanded the speculative mind, such as Epstein exercises
upon phenomena, but so far as I was able to detect, this
speculative metaphysical mind is not yet a portion of the
Dutch film attitude, nor am I sure that the Dutch mind enjovs
such' effete practices as Epstein employs. Finis Terrae, I
was told in Amsterdam, is a wretched film, and all that is
good in it is here and there a physical device. Yet Finis
Terrae should have meant something to the Dutch practicians
as a study in the utilization of natural tempers and in the
exploitation of native types. They might even avoid
Epstein's speculative treatment to see his structural employ-
ment of bodily parts. I think it would be well for the Dutch
cinematists to remain concerned with the physical evidences
of folk. They have at hand a rich source in their graphic
art. They should go, not necessarily to their greatest artists
(though Rembrandt can teach every cinematist much about
tones) but to those of their artist, or Flemish or German
artists, who have remained most folkish : an Abel Grimmer,
for instance. Or for grander employments of folk activities
to the paintings of the Brueghels and to Bosch — these are
full of the kinetic. The galleries in Antwerp, Brussels and
Amsterdam are replete with sources. I refer this examination
to the cinematists of Belgium too. In Antw^erp, the Flemish
Cinema Club has produced a film Leentje van de Zee (Peggy
of the Sea), which I went to view thinking here might be the
rudiments of a folk-film, if not a realized folk-film. The
Dutch film Breakers possessed a dignity and seriousness of
effort. But this film of amateurs with its ancient story of
childhood love, the drunkard foe, the false accusation of

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murder, the crippled idiot's devotion and martyrdom was
hilariously stupid. Nothing to redeem it, not even an honest
intention. Yet for as little an expenditure these amateurs
might have produced a document of some Flemish village
which might have taught them just what material they
possess. And by studying their graphic artists they might
have learned something of tones and textures and stylizations.
Carl Dreyer did not disdain the sources existent in graphic art.
He found such sources in the medieval French miniatures, in
Flemish art (the blood-letting scene), in Brueghel (the fair
scene, the mob explosion, after the explosion the poignant
prayer scene at the drawbridge), etc.^ The Dutch and the
Belgian cinematists will do well if they study their folk-
painters, look into their folk-writers, watch their folk-move-
ments and remain folk for a while. Whereas in the lands of
more ambitious cinemas of longer history, the fullest cinematic
achievement wilj be attained if folk is utilized only as film-
history. That is, Germany and America have done enough
folk filming, now they must transcend folk. Germany has
done this, for instance, in Hans Behrendt's film, Die Hose
— the German comedy here leaves behind, the redundant
Harry Liedtke folk film, like W ochenendezauher (a jolly
local picture), or the Fritz Kampers picture Semkes sel

^ It is true that graphic knowledge may injure the cinegraphic, but
such injury proves only the incapability of the injured. Murnau believes
— if he has been quoted correctly — that the cinematist should leave other
mediums out of one's ken, yet Sunrise is certainly enriched by paint-
ings (the peasant and his wife at the table laid with heavy earthenware
above which a lamp is tilted). There is a difference between paintings
being copied into film (De Mille's Xfn^ of Kings) and the structure
of paintings incorporated into a film. The latter is a fusion of basic atti-
tudes, the former a confusion of false attitudes.

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Witwe, Die Hose has left these behind but has its roots
in it. America as yet has not extended beyond its folk-bases.
These have accumulated for America a mythology which
should, when the right artist comes, create a grand and
gorgeous cinema. The western film remains a folk-myth.
Had there been the mind for creation when Fred Thomson
did Jesse James, there would have evolved a film as great as
Quixote — or at least a film of broad and racy references. I
shall, however, speak of these national cinemas later. My
reason for bringing them into these paragraphs upon unity
is summed up thus : in the unity that is the aesthetic problem
of all film artists, there are the details of unity which in each
land take on different necessities.

HARRY A. POTAMKIN.

(Our readers who have enjoyed and profited by Mr. Potam-
kin's excellent articles which have appeared frequently in
Close Up, will be gratified to learn that we have been able to
avail ourselves of his services as New York correspondent.
Mr. Potamkin is just concluding a prolonged stay in Europe,
and the majority of his essays which have appeared in our
pages have been the fruits of his experience of European
cinema. Mr. Potamkin's demand for cinema at its source,
and his ability to go to the source for his investigation have
made those fruits of exceptional worth. We are certain that
our readers will share our pleasure that we shall have for
our New York critic (where perhaps the most significant
developments of cinema in the future will take place) the one
man, perhaps, most perfectly equipped to undertake that by
no means uncomplicated role. Ed,)

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THE "TALKIE" MELODY

The time has come, the oracle said, to talk of many things;
of talkie films and chorus girls, and Broadway's movie kings.
This is the Siren Age. We have passed from Iron to Steel,
and now to the blare of the saxoplione's wicked moan as re-
produced by a battery of loudspeakers. I sometimes wonder
what Carl Laemmle buys, one half so " precious " as the
goods he sells.

The talkie has come to stay. Jesse Lasky told me so him-
self. Yes, I have held converse with the mighty. All the
twelve tribes. Will Hays predicted it a year ago. Jack
Warner thinks the silent picture is dead. He should know.

He helped to kill it.

Colonel Bromhead has an opinion about it somew^here. But
he has never told us.

We can only bow to the decision of High Finance and
agree that the talkie has come to stay. Shakespeare, who is
nearly as well known by this time as Clara Bow, predicted
it in one of his plays. Biblical references to the matter are
somewhat obscure, but I don't doubt you could find them if
you wish. Old Khayyam has a stanza in which he mentions
the " Potter's shoulder-knot a-creaking." Western Electric

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have forestalled him. Only the talkies could bring the
Persian Muse to life like that.

By now, the best writers on the subject agree, the talkie
has evolved from the experimental stage. Those we are now
enjoying, those which are now being lapped up so readily by
the public, those for which some of us are sufficiently silly to
pay hard-earned money, are indicative of the entertainment of
the future. A sobering thought, brothers.

Until America decides to knock all the world's Quotas and
all the world's industries sideways by introducing sound,
that is. Meanwhile, it is better to be merry with the fruity
: dialogue than sadder after none or third-rate silent pictures.

In cOiirse of time, no doubt, we shall evolve a medium
which will combine sound with shadow, will develop some
composite means of -expression in which the various elements
can be blended to produce a thought. Up to the present we
have merely combined to produce the front legs of the chorus
and the hip-flask of the bootlegger. Broadway, as all students
of the talkies know, is a place where policemen in evening
dress rub shoulders with gentlemen in fancy dress, dressed
as policemen.

But we cannot logically expect the talkie to continue in
the way it is going. Even granting that full many a murder
is born to blush' unseen and waste its sweetness on the
provincial screens, we must at least admit that the population
of the Bowery is declining so rapidly through the exploits of
the Hollywood gunmen that in decency to themselves pro-
ducers will have to branch out into something new.

Another sobering thought. Welford Beaton, editor of the
Hollywood Film Spectator ^ who has as sound an inside

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knowledge of the Film Colony as any journalist, informs us
that within a year we shall have a return to honest-to-goodness
sob-stuff. Once more we shall be able to gaze upon the
sorry spectacle of Mammy left at home crying her eyes out
while the Prodigal Son wastes the family mortgage making
dates w4th the latest thing in show girls.

However, this may be, and whatever the trend of the com-
mercial talkie, and further disregarding the development of the
sound picture as an art medium, those specimens to which
the public are subscribing super-profits are worthy of
analysis. If you are an industrious collector of Press
cuttings, you have no doubt already learnt the fact that
Broadway Melody is the sweetest little tinkle the box-office
has ever known, and that the Singing Fool is the greatest
contribution to modern art since Ethel M. Dell wrote The
Way of an Eagle and Marie Corelli told us everything we
ought to know^ about the things about which we knew^
nothing. If, as I say, you have learnt these facts about the
talkies, the appended remarks will not be of the slightest
interest to you. But if — awful thought : — you are one of
those rebels who regard Sonny Boy as an excellent soporific
and Home Towners as a first class box-office bet for Saint
Dunstan's, you may find spiritual solace therein.

BROADWAY MELODY. (Mctro-Goldwyn-Mayer).
About 700,000 people paid to see this picture at the Empire,
London.

There are pictures and pictures. This is neither. It w^as
my privilege to see it in company with a dear old lady who
suffers from a slight deafness. She missed all the jokes. As

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I didn't notice any it came to the same thing. Broadway
Melody is the perfect 1929 talkie. It is the answer to the
showmen's prayer for a successor to Ben Hur and The Big
Parade {vide an M-G-M advertisement in a trade paper).

It deals with the million lights on Broadway and the fate
which awaits chorus girls who make dates with rich men.
Enter the Censor, dancing a polka, waving a petticoat on
high, and blushing painfully. It gives us an inspiring in-
sight into the various processes through which the show girl
passes in order to undress for the evening's entertainment.
Exit the Censor.

But it is realistic. Yes. It fairly shrieks realism. Horns
honk, automobiles put on the brakes with a shrieking of what-
ever it is which sounds so indescribably ghastly, feet patter,
doors are made to knock on, and leading players lisp all over
the picture.

There is a new technique in Filmland nowadays. Once
upon a time, when the w^orld was young and the earth was
desolate and movie-less, you showed a man knocking on the
door by shooting a close-up of his hand. That told the
audience what they wanted to know\ At the present stage of
the talkie you show the fist, and your R. C. A. expert faith-
fully records the knock. The audience thus knows that it is
a real man and a genuine knock.

Subtle, that.

Someday a man will think of shooting the door from the
inside leaving the sound to convey the act of knocking. Then
we shall have what will be known as talkie technique, and, if
it is Maurice Elvey who thinks of it, the papers will clamour
about the brilliance of the English school of talking pictures.

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Raspberries.

Broadway Melody has another attribute which stamps it as
a great talkie. The light relief is supplied by a gentleman
with a bald head and a stutter. There is something extremely
funny in a man who stutters. Particularly when he can
enunciate the w^ord he requires by w^histling for it. I wonder
who thought of that gag. He will probably get a special Hell
to himself, in which fifteen million bright and breezy Broad^
ways will roar their traffic and their stutters to him. It will
serve him right.

As a film — I apologise, a slip of the pen. As a two-
dimensional musical comedy Broadway Melody has some
brilliant tunes. One of them deals v/ith the fact that I belong
to you, and that you, curiously enough, belong to me. I
endured it that far. But when the leading man continued
with the words Angels sent you from on high," I decided
to lodge a complaint as soon as I got there. A joke's a joke.

There is a sequence in the picture all in colour. A sequence
in which the faces of the players remind you of the colour of
milk chocolate and their limbs have the appearance of that
delightful old gentleman who exhibits part of his nudity in a
case in the Britsh Museum. Shelley said something some-
where about life being a multi-coloured sphere. Maybe he
would have liked Broadway Melody.

The Observer's film critic, of whom I candidly expected
better things, considers that this film has rhythm. It must
have been very subtle if it did.

Having entered the Empire while the show was on, I saw
it backwards, so to speak. One line of dialogue particularly

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impressed me. You can't trust these rich guys," the hero
wailed to the heroine. They're only after one thing."
' So was I. My hat. I reached it and scrambled to the
nearest exit. .

BROADWAY. Universal. (Trade shown at the Carlton,
iLfOndon). ; • r ^
■ There is only one Broadway and Universal has it, read the
synopsis of the filrn at its trade show. Well, that's some-
thing to be thankful, for, anyway. No, this sort of thing will
get us precisely nowhere. Blackmail is still the only passable
talkie I have seen.

In Broadway you find the mixture as before. Only
more so. Speak-easies and murders, chorus girls and limb.
But it has technique. Universal assured us of that in
advance. In its production they employed a travelling crane
for the first time in the history of the cinema. At least, I
think it w^as a travelling crane. It may only have been a
revue chorus. What amused me about it, though, was the
fact that this much praised technique was silent picture stuff.
The film bore all the earmarks of having been partially com-
pleted before the wave broke, and having been switched over
to the sound studio while actually on the floor. All the while
the characters are running about, they are usually silent.
The moment the drama develops w^e drift back to the good
old stage grouping.

Mind you, in parts it is not so bad. There is movement in
Broadway, It has what perhaps only two other talkies have.
Space. But the talking parts are cramped and staged."
The opening sequence, in w^hich the camera follows a man on

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a tour of an expensive night club is to all intents and purpos^$
a silent picture.

Broad'way was made by Dr. Paul Fejos, who, as you know,
directed Hollywood's magnum opus^ The Last Moment.
Carl Laemmle, Jnr., was production supervisor of this
Universal Super Talking Special. The more we are to-
gether, the merrier we will be. . :;

THE PERFECT ALIBI. United Aritsts production. (Presented
at the Carlton Theatre, London).

As this film developed I really thought. . . . Yes, I
thought, but only thought, that at last I was to see a good
talkie. But it was merely a fool's paradise. Within ten
minutes the film had straightened out into the Great White
Way and the bootleggers were hi-jacking and the chorus
kicking as much as ever.

The Perfect Alibi features a cast of stage players who get
their lines over and act quite well along the familiar track of
melodrama. It has one central problem, according to its
advertisements. And that problem deals with the fact that
Chick Williams is wanted for murder.

We have here, as the trade Press reviewers would say, the
story of a boy who, released from a New York prison,
murders a policeman during a raid. He marries the daughter
of another policeman, and is suspected of the crime. The
young wife tries to get him an alibi, and is amazed at learning
that he is the murderer. He is cleverly trapped with a detec-
tive whom he shoots with the utmost heartiness.

The death scene, in which

A choir of vitaphone symphony angels

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do their stuff ofif-stage while the drama rolls on behind the
scene, ending up with a saxophonic dirge as the detective
kicks the bucket, is one of the highUghts of a production
which, by reason of its power and the fidelity of its portrayals,
the sweeping panorama of its emotions and the realistic and
attractive night club settings, should most certainly please
the popular patron with a taste in realistic melodrama.

A word should be added, as the reviewers would continue,
on the excellence of the recording, the perfect synchronisation
— as when a revolver is fired and the sound-groove emits a
loud explosion at the identical moment, and the time when
a car travels down a street with the amplifiers doing overtime
— and the general purity and realism of the reproduction.

Well, well, well. Next please.

MOVIETONE FOLLIES. A Fox production. (Presented at the
New Gallery, London).

This picture is interesting. No one, except the Fox
Publicity Department, could call it good, but like Broadway
Melody it is indicative of a definite trend in screen entertain-
ment. Broadway Melody was a musical comedy reduced to
the screen ; Movietone Follies is a two-dimensional revue.
Some of it is in colour.

In America, Warner Brothers are now showing a talkie-
revue that is in colour throughout. It would seem that, when
stereoscopy makes its debut in practical form, we shall have
films which will merely be catalogues of the leading stage
hits.

This picture, as a picture, is a revue. No more. No less.
It cannot be called a film ; it cannot be judged on film

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principles. If you like the sort of revue which gets good notices
in the small-town papers you will like Follies. Especially if
you realise it is a pioneer effort and forget the mediocrity of
many of its numbers. If it has rhythms, they are the snappy,
quick change rhythms of the chorus, its tempo is the hastv
get-a-move-on tempo of the vaudeville stage. Its numbers
are just the same.

For the life of me I cannot see why people should pay to
see a thing like this when they can see a first-class revue on
the stage, even aside from the novelty value of the cinema
show. The Provinces may make money out of it, but in the
big town it deserves to flop. When you compare it w^ith such
a brilliant piece of work as Noel Coward's show. This Year of
Grace. . . .

Yet, with the acquisition of good authors and men who
can write the sort of music which makes a success of musical
comedies, the time is near when the screen revue will knock
the stage version backwards. The additional power of the
camera over the eye will give the screen a tremendous start
over the stage. Size, depth, colour, movement, will be no
object. When we get a screen revue that is snappy, colour-
ful, tuneful, and vast, in the stage sense, we shall be able to
dictate to Equity.

As a pioneer effort, therefore, Movietone Follies is
interesting. It gives some idea, however small, of what is to
come, however much we may regret its coming.

BULLDOG DRUMMOXD. United Artists picture. (Presented
at the Tivoli, London).

On second thoughts, no. Some things are best left unsaid,

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There may be some good points in this talkie. If so I never
noticed them.

The tour is concluded. Let us worship at the shrine of the
talkie. It is so clever. The dialogue is always so resourceful.
And it sums up popular taste to a nicety. I confidently
predict that when we get the first war " talkie " we shall
have the Angels of Mons doing the Charleston, while the
hero watches some gun-runners in the enemy trenches.

The talkie is drifting. Clever journalists in the English
press have noticed the way of the drift. My handkerchief.
A little weeping now and then, is tonic to the best of men.

We have seen the world's greatest talkies. Which they all
are.

Ladies and gentlemen, in the words of Mr. Blakeston, the
door !

HUGH CASTLE.

MECHANISMS OF CINEMA II

We have explored the serious possibilities of the new
technical developments of cinematography . . . we have
analysed a recent abstract film in relation to these mechanisms
. . . the time has now come to launch something new.

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Further developments of the experimental film interest us
intensely. I have in mind the abstract film . . . that perfectly
constructed visualisation of an abstract set of thoughts. Has
it yet been achieved ? Has anything yet come up to this
definition ? Abstract ideas have been evoked by visual
impressionism, but has there been self analysis ? By self
analysis I mean Dramatization.

I spoke before of what has become, for me, the classic
example of Dramatization : the " literalness " of a certain
passage in The Street. The wayward clerk sees his wife's
image going away from him, as he looks at his wedding
ring before staking it in the gambling hall. He is considering
his wife's nearness . . . not materially, spatially, but in
the abstract sense of conjugality. The abstraction has already
been evoked (in us) by facial expression, but here is the
introspective mental process itself in dramatic form : spatial
nearness being destroyed.

Another and perhaps the most beautiful example ever
conceived, is from Nemesis : the musical visualisation in the
insect sequences. Here, however, visual impressions of
floating music did not quite come into focus . . . they
struggled but faded away again.

Actually, I am unable to describe these optical forms . . .
one must see them to appreciate.

Dramatization is never quite the abstract meaning, neither
quite symbolic . . . something near and infinitely expressive,
and above all visual.

In the new experimental film then there must be
Dramatization. The aim of cinema is to be visual and
the abstract-film must visualise its abstractions in their

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primary perceptions. The man in the street will understand
and learn something . . . obscurity and mystery must be
abolished.

Having swept away certain things, we may ask, is a film
which satisfies these conditions really abstract? My answer
is yes . . . also it is really cinematic. For are not many of us
ao^ainst the unevoked abstraction which must be artificially
introduced by a caption, sound, or other means? Is not the
whole trend of cinema proper towards visual resolution of
latent import? So with abstract-cinema, for all cinema is
the same, fundamentally.

* * *

The most beautiful and at the same time most powerful
mechanism of abstraction is the " mix." I seem to be
repeating my previous article . . . everywhere replace

latent " by " abstract "... the two are synonymous . . .
the repetition then becomes clearly understandable. We seem
to have formulated something fundamental about all cinema
so that there is bound to be repetition in ultimate analyses
which return to the same elementary theorems. I will there-
fore, not repeat the analytic reasons for this, but will content

myself with the generalised statement.

* * *

Only when we discuss the remaining cinematic mechanisms
in the construction of abstract-films is there cause for deeper
analysis.

In dealing with abstract ideas, in general the subject matter
will be devoid of personal relations ... no human actors . . .
therefore no apparent cause to tise Displacement (camera
angle in particular) to transfer psychic effect from character

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to audience. Those moments when the camera acquires the
personality of one of the actors will as a rule be absent.

But how^ fascinating to displace from some inanimate thing
to the audience . . . when camera becomes (abstractly) the
" eye " of some dead object, perceiving " relativistically.
Surely as legitimate as the autobiography. Imagine, if vou
can, the autobiography of a penny in film !

. . . born in the mint with the ring of a gentleman . . . into
pockets . . . into gas meters . . . into children's sticky hands
. . . burning holes in pockets . . . relegated to the money box
for misconduct ... a devil-may-care-pennv deciding at a toss
the fate of its master ... a bad penny and the hell of the
crucible which awaits it . . . and of course the ' o^ood-old '
penny pensioned into somebody's collection."^

There is a leaning in recent cinema towards new "displaced "
experiences which merge onto the abstract in significance.
Thus, in The Spy, it seems we actually become the train
hurtling along over rhythmically knocking rail joints . . .
you remember: thirty-three one three three "— thirtv-
three one three three ..."

Who else (or what else) in that narrative as it stands, could
be perched on those axles about two feet from the ground ?
Let us be cautious before we dism.iss peculiar camera angles
as absurdities, but also let us be quite definite in our

* (The Adventures of a Ten Mark Sote, — that despised and rejected
fragment, now heavily dated, — worked this idea, occasionally w^ith
charm. The ultimate effect was, however, trite, the displacement of
values soon tiltin^ the plane of action into a constant malappropriate
sermonising and false emphasi-. — Ed.l

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intentions in such cases. The now well-known Asquithian
limitations may also set a limit to the penetrative depth of
cinegraphic introspection. Against this we are pledged to
fight.

¥fr ^ ^

We now come to analyse the form of the abstract-film . . .
La Marche des Machines was without commas or colons . . .
its form seemed to be merely a matter of sensed sequences
rather than definitely punctuated ones. Cinema has its means
of punctuating its narrative content, to which latter is
attached, by the bye, the primary significance of punctuation
as essentially a mechanism of narration. There appears
therefore no " a priori " reason for omission.

Pedantic criticism of so delightful a work as La Marche
des Machines is to be deplored . . . still, it serves a purpose
without unduly detracting from a cold beauty which may,

for that matter, set its own conventions.

* * ■ .

The future of the abstract-film is not necessarily pointing
in a direction;^' non-commercial." On the contrary, it may
be expected to achieve a wider interest as time and experiment
proceed.

* * *

Later I hope to discuss the Documentary-Film and Comedy,
before which latter I am already beginning to quail. I hereby
definitely dissociate myself from the " technically amusing "
comic, also I refuse to further its progress by dicussions of
any such technique. Still, I shall probably have something
to say.

L. Saalschutz.

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THE IMPLICATIONS OF REVUE

Lots of quite intelligent people sniff at revue. It means to
them white leg-traffic, ostentation, and (if they don't like it)
jazz. As usual with a thing that is only a quite-good thing,
it is the essential that is overlooked. Revue is primarily
entertainment. That is why it is the only form of English
stage presentation to-day with any kick in it. It's not tied
down and hasn't any business about art, and what people
thinks is art, to contend with. It is enough if it entertains
(and how much more it does that than our drawing-room
plays and our contributions to serious dramatic Art"). It
entertains all right, because there is something behind it ; if
you're not entertained, you don't get through to that, you
don't reach the behindness, and you stay tangled up with the
silk curtains and the wet-whitened legs, which of course you
hate. A whirl of girls. Revue is awful. I like revue,
because I'm intensely serious. It is almost the only kind of
stage presentation I go to, it's certainly the only kind I get
anything from. And what I do come near to getting from
any other form is always something, that, in the long run,
approximates to revue .... a personality, a sketch, a type.
And the great thing to me about revue is that, though part of

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a method of representation that is maddeningly tied down,
in one respect it is free. It isn't tied down to time. It roves.
Place to place. It flies, flits, lands here, flies off again there — a
butterfly, to use a revue metaphor, handing you a bunch of
flowers.

And each flower it lands on, it really does give you, essence
and all. Not a Clarkson imitation. A good revue sketch
gives you suddenly, easily, slickly, a person, or a way of
thinking or a way of noticing that thought, quite straight.
Are the living, vivid and alert characters, if any, that you
have drawn from the London stage since the war, those de-
picted, by Tempest, Cooper, Forbes-Roberston, or are they
Lillie, Gay, and, though I don't really like him, Sonnie Hale?
Braithwaite of course is living, is hard and real, better than
she knows and better than she'd dare to be if she knew what
it is she is to us. But her plays aren't hard and real.
Silver Cord was just her talking, in the same line as Gay talk-
ing, in The Old Lady Shows Her Muddles, Tallulah is a
revue without music ; and with not much intelligence. And it
isn't really worth going to plays for personalities when you
have Nellie W. and Lily Morris on the halls, though per-
sonalities are almost all the plays give you. When they
give more, what happens ? Have you ever seen a good war-
play that was as good as a good war-film ? What did that
Silver Cord do that hasn't been attained more directly in
plenty of revue sketches? Haven't schools been got "
a thousand times more subtly, with less pretension, than in
Young Woodley ? You see, the middle-class don't go
to revue, consciously. So revue doesn't have to cater for
them. It did once, at the Hippodrome and during the war,

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but now there are onl}' Cochran and Chariot, and the
bourgeoisie simply don't get them. They have the Co-
Optimists, Dalys and lately Drury Lane putting on elabor-
ately constipated plays. Yes, there must be a play as well.
Something to think of, they call it, but it's really a drug to
soothe spiritual indigestion. To ask our happy homes to
get on to the speed and stamina of a revue, real revue, is too
much — after dinner. Wake up and dream. No, thev
can't do it, so revue needn't bother and in consequence avoids
being half-dead.

If you are half-dead, you can't cope with revue's freedom
in time. You call it jerky. It exhausts you trying to follow
it, panting along behind, and finding yourself pitched back
to another song and dance after a ballet you never understood.
What was the use of trying to follow, if you had to come back
again. You call revue " disconnected when what it has
done, under its girl-show^ cover, is to co-ordinate time, time
here and time there, and use it and not be awed by it. And so
use something bigger than is possible to other forms.

But time has been as far as it could get. Being stage
production it couldn't use space. This is where it links on
with films. Films are free in time and space. O yes, and
so is poetry, hold that. Up to now we have had to find our
cinema equivalent of revue in light but polished Paramount
pictures, glittering Arzners and so on. But talkies naturally
meant that people would see the profits of talkie musical-
comedy, a mixture as dreadful as you can imagine. If you
don't like talkies, and you don't like musical-comedies, what
could be worse than Brocidicay Melody and The Singing
Whatever-he-ivas ?

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Which perhaps explains why so many people did not see
Movietone Follies, And also why the word ran round from
those who did that it was worth seeing. I suppose " follies "
is a bad word. At any rate, lots of people did not go. They
might have heard the music in the gramophone stores, and
found it was quite pleasant and reserved the film for one of
those nights when all one wants is moving image and a
saxaphone flowing over one. But I suppose lots of people
don't care about jazz. This revue isn't lost, how^ever ; it's
not generally released till October. But it had a long pre-
release at the New Gallery and then was on at the Astoria
after that.

I trailed in, suspicious but unexpectantly acceptant,
because I was wanting that night just what anv big cinema
gives, irrespective of the film; the kind of thing so many
writers for Close Up are so good in describing about visits
to movies. A sob-stuff with Louise Dresser was on. The
lady who does not act unless the part has real artistic interest.
This which had pleased her to appear in w^as Not Quite
Decent. One registered this film also was Fox, Dresser,
who always understands more than all and pardons nearly
all of it, pretended to get tight, in order to rescue a goil from
a hang-out. Then, mother-love embrace and " just a
baby .... just a little tiny baby". This was a silent film.
I saw just this much of it twice and I enjoyed just this much
of it tremendously. She is a mammy-singer, and it all ends
with her weeping into her make-up as the two Young Things
leave her, stretching out a pair of half-blacked hands and
covering a half-smeared face. Which is a very good
beginning for the Fox talkie revue.

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Yes, it is a revue. Not entirely yet, but the nearest thing
we have had and sufficiently near to make us hope they will
go on like it. That is why I am writing about Movietone
Follies; which so many people didn't think worth seeing.
It got awful notices of course, after Broadway Melody.
Opening shot, a man fitting a theatre with the name-signs
of a revue, fading to lobby, porter dusting, getting ready
for the opening night. Young man arrives, because his
girl is in the show. The porter is Fetchit and w^as on his
plantation. The porter says if he can't get him into the
show^, no one else will get out. In Fetchit's voice. So now
we can be taken into the theatre.

The revue is being rehearsed. There is a story, of course.
The financiers are bankrupt and beset with creditors. The
young man wants to get his girl out of show business, so he
goes into it himself, buys the show^ . . . in order to be able
to fire her. She won't be fired, and all between the scenes
of the revue there is back-stage back-chat. The lead won't
go on, so this girl takes her place, and is a great success.
Together with Fetchit, who also goes on to fill a gap and
does some marvellous dancing, she makes the show. So
that the financiers buy the young man out again. This story
was reviewed as " slight " and probably that it " held up
the action". You know that tag. Well, it is slight, that
is why it doesn't matter and doesn't interfere with this being
a revue. It is a pity we have to have a story, but there is
much less story here, and a simpler one, than we have had
in other musical talkies, so it does not bother us. As to
holding up the action, it doesn't if you see it as part of the
action. If you see it as part of the revue, only another turn, it

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doesn't hold up the action at all. And why shouldn't vou see it
that way? You like it then, and you presumably don't go
to the film to crab it if you possibly can. Besides, don't
you think that this story, which is so slight, has been deliber-
ately simplified? It's such a silly little story, it couldn't
possibly be meant to hold our attentions, and when the revue
itself has been so intelligently directed by Marcel Silver,
mightn't someone have been responsible for intelligently
subordinating the story until it could be slipped in here and
there as just another scene in the revue? This seems, at
any rate to me, to relate the show to what is going on.

The revue, anyhow, is quite intelligently directed. The
actors are introduced in revue style . . . Fetchit, the porter
knocking them up in their dressing rooms with opening-night
bouquets. Then the opening chorus. To get the flavour.
You know^ opening choruses. Whoops, and lots of girls
and the orchestra. Silver does this by bits ..." legs "
chant the girls, and legs aren't seen all at once in rows.
There is a pair of legs; another fades in higher up on the
screen, the leg part of the chorus song has gone on, this
is just the chorus, but our legs on the screen go on, moving
in patterns, seen in close-up, sometimes far away, black and
white, fully realised in their patterning. Then one reminis-
cent of Eviak Bakia, One above the others in squares,
several pairs, moving in different speeds, doing different
things. The same happens when the chorus is on. . . eyes
. . . . hips .... lips . . . None of this is intellectual:

it is the opening of the revue, and reaching out and not
stereotyped. Mightn't it be called experimental if it were
in a small film ? Then the whole chorus leap on the stage,

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we don't know where these legs were before, in someone's
imagination simply. We get the dance from a number of
well-cut angles, as we never could on the stage. It is the
same later, in Breakaway, we get more than usual, in this
film revue.

The next turn is a song by a typist who looks longingly at
the mannequins she would like to be like. The stage is a
shop window wdth one or two posing, and she stands by the
side. Then she wanders along, window after window. We
realise after a little that this stretch of windows could not be
got on to a stage, and there has been no scene shifting. It is
continuous. She is simply walking along a street, and it is
a street seen in a film and so, since the theatre is a threatre
seen in a film, and we are taking it as real, the street is real.
You couldn't use a real street in a stage revue. This moving
along in unbroken setting of street is revue moving in space.
Film revue is evidently going to mean moving in space as
well as in time. Such revues as London Calling and This
Year of Grace have a unity of theme and outlook which
keeps the time together ; the film revue as yet can only do
this by means of a slight story, but it need not be thought
that it will have to always. This scene prepares us, if you
look at how the film is made, for this discovery about space.
After this scene, the revue swings freely, where it will. The
girl firm-set at first in a theatre, leads us along and leads us
out of the confines of a theatre, so that when a man later
sings Walkin' with Susie, we are prepared for the things
that occur on the screen. It begins, a series of round out of
focus objects, the camera moving away. They gradually
crystallise into a man. Then we get him semi-close-up,

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singing. It would be dull to have him simply singing.
What we have is half of him, looking at us, and other halves
radiating from his head all over the screen. All the heads
merge, I think there are six of him, one actual and five
trick ones, diagonal and upside down. As he sings and
sways all these sway, so that the screen is filled with a rhythm
of white gloves, black shiny hat, and teeth moving. A
visual as well as a sound rhythm. We have not had a song
treated like that before have we? His hands are prominent,
beating time to the song, so we accept the image of a music-
stand which swims up, blotting out, and letting us only see
through the bars. It follows, in every sense. When it
clears, what we have been seeing through the bars is a
Harlem scene, Negroes w^alkin* w^ith Susie, — but all the time
once more the blacks and whites are relating to the pattern
in which the song was orignally put across. Also of course,
there is what I wrote of in the last number. .... realisation
that the screen is equally a matter of Blacks and whites.
After some ordinary black-tail numbers, we have Negroes
in white clothes; reversed harmony. And a snappy scene
full of 'spirit.

The same thing happens with Big City Blues, This says
just to think to-night is Thanksgiving, everybody's going
somewhere. Nobody knows that Pm living,'' etc. How
would you put a Blues across? You've words and scene.
Which will you use? You w^on't use both, of course. I
mean, no one has thought of it. But you know what watch-
ing songs being sung on the screen is like. That is why you
didn't go at first to Movietone Follies. Remember the sing-
ing numbers in the early Vitaphone days at the Piccadilly?

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And seen Estelle Brody singing Mean To Me before
Blackmail at the Capitol? ]\Iy God!

Marcel Silver does use both, however. Primitively, but
having used them both, he or someone else may develop it.
We have the girl just going on from the wings, with the
tune being played. We hear it and see .... a crowd of
high people, singing and shouting rather mistily. To-night
is Thanksgiving. Something catches your eye as a little
smaller and a little brighter than the rest. As you watch,
you see it is a lamp-post smaller than thev are and as you
get that, you notice they have faded, away. The girl is
there, singing by the lamp post. When clarinet and saxo-
phone do their stuff, the figures swoop back. It isn't taken
nearly as far as it ought to be, but even if it isn't taken at all,
I'll allow you that it is picked up and not left a heavy lump
on the ground.

These are the obvious things you discover and hear about
the film. The cutting is verv ingenious in preserving and
getting the rhythm of the music in the sound, and the angles
enrich our idea of revue. We see what a dance is. It isn't
an elaborate show. You can spot the same dresses worn
again and again, and can you beat that ? There is one colour
ballet, which is better than most colour ballets. The
theatre in which the revue is supposed to be given is not the
biggest ever built .... and do watch how the lady in the
light dress fills up a space as she walks down in the interval
The back-stage and dres^sing room scenes were surely done
in the plain studio itself. When you look, it can't have
been a very expensive show. Sue Carol and Stepin Fetchit
are the only names. It's not ostentatious. But it has a funny

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kind of sparkle about it. It doesn't attempt to satirise or
" get " as Lillie gets " waitresses, concert singers, char-
ladies and revue actresses. There is no Bus Rush, and the
one sketch misses fire becaifse you can't hear Fetchit's last
line, on which it depends. But look at the backstage bit,
and there is a lot got there. A nice sketch, if you can
only see it that way, of the ballet slipper man. And Fetchit's
treatment of the girl who got no flowers; Did anyone
send you any flowers to-night miss?" Xo.'' That's
right then, you didn't get none." It's not complete as a film
nor complete as a revue. It is one of those you find bits
in and piece together in vour mind with bits from other
films. But it has more bits in it than most. It shows how
the camera can express the idea of revue, and how images
do help sound to form new revue patterns. It doesn't come
up to Cochran level, but it's the first one that gives any
idea of the kick and sparkle 'some of us find in revue. See
the revue sequence in The Perfect Alibi and see this, and
see which is nearer to being right. And what I mean is
this. If revue can be got by talkies, there is the hell of a
lot more that can be got. It is the thread of ideas that make
up a revue, which, in short, is an affair of imagery. And
that, you see, ?s w^hat a poem is, and I mean, having real-
ised that you can with talkies get a thread of ideas, vocal but
unlimited to time and place, it seems to me that even you
who didn't see this at first in talkies, ought to see now what
a lot is open to you. Lyrical filming, aery poems that must
have speech and must have visual pattern which words can't
do. There is masses. ^Masses and masses of things we had
not known we could film and now simply because a revue

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can be made, surely Ave know what else can be made? Yes.

By way of coda, Ethel Waters, the great Negro singer,
is singing in On With The Shoiv, and Cochran is making
a talkie revue in England, and won't somebody else do
something? The fact that they've got Albert de Courville
to direct another one. means that my wonderful country
is trying its best to make a middle-class talkie revue. So
won't someone else do something? Won't it occur to
them to do a good abstract this way ? I like good abstracts ;
I have seen so many of the other kinds. An abstract is
a revue, and you can go so much further with a talkie
abstract. If you want to go anywhere.

Robert Herring.

THE TALKLNG CINEMA IN THE

USSR

The problem of constructing equipment for a talking
cinema was at first introduced in the USSR in 1926, by the
young physicist, P. G. Tager. Since then, three scientific
research workers continue their experiments : Tager, Dgiguit,
and Shishov. Very soon this work will be completed.

The first part of the work consisted in an experimental
testing of the principles which are laid down in the

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apparatus. At the close of the first stage of the work, on
March 9th, 1927, was demonstrated the transformation of the
sound waves into electrical current and then into light and
reversely, the transmitting of light waves into electrical
current and again into sound.

The second part of the work consisted in constructing a
laboratory model of the apparatus, vvhich would fix the
sounds upon a photographic film and reproduce them anew.
Besides, it had to determine the conditions under which such
photographing should take place. It was shown that of all
the methods of registering sounds optically upon a cinemato-
graphic film, as learned in the laboratory process, the best
fitted theoretically as well as experimentally, is the system in
which the modulation of light is based upon the phenomenon
of a double breaking of the rays in the di-electric which is
fixed to the electric pole (electro static phenomena of Karr).
The registering of the sound is received in the form of a
number of parallel lines of various width and intensity. This
part of the work was also completed by a demonstration on
March 4th, 1928, in the presence of many representatives of
Sovkino, of the scientific technical Administration of the
Supreme Council of National Economy, of the People's
Commissariat of Education and of a number of other organi-
zations and institutions, to whom the talking film was
demonstrated.

The great amount of experimental and theoretic material
forthcoming, permitted immediate construction of such
models of talking cinema apparatus as would permit the
technical exploitation of these apparati in the factories of the
USSR.

210

Hev Way, a Sovkino film directed bv Pitriz^-ak and Poznanskv.

Mertegli, from the book, by D. Furmanov, of the same title. A
Sovkino production directed by P. I. ]\Ioshenko,

The Black Sail. Operator ^latrov. The artist is Boslavskv

t'6

§ .2

The Fall of The House of Usher, Epstein's lilm from the sombre
fantasy by Poe, which is being eagerly anticipated in London at the
Avenue PaviUon.

The Fall of The House of Usher, Jean Epstein's film.

A British Amateur Film. From Waitress !, a film by Orlton West
for the Film Guild of London. Miss Allan takes the part of the
waitress, whose illness and inexperience lead to a tragedy on the
first day of her employment.

The Ghost that Never Returns, Alexander Room's film for Sovkino.

CLOSE UP

Soon the first sets of equipment for the talking cinema will
be put into use. The whole equipment is constructed in the
USSR with the exception of a few parts of it, manufactured
in Germany. It should be noted that the mass production of
talking cinema equipment will be soon made possible in the
USSR also, including the few parts now imported.

The construction of the equipment for the talking cinema is
carried on in Moscow, at the All Union Electrical Institute,
belonging to the Scientific Technical Administration of the
Supreme Council of National Economy.

The first sound films of the USSR will be Eisenstein's
General Line and Pudovkin's To Live is Good,

P.A.

CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCE

DIALOGUE IN DIXIE.

Meekly punctual, clasping our prejudices in what might
just possibly prove to be a last embrace, w^e entered the
familiar twilight : the softly-gilded interior twilight, the
shared, living quietude, still fresh and morning-new in their
strange power. We could not be cheated altogether. We
might be about to enter a new kingdom. Curiosity joined

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battle with fear and was winning when upon the dark screen
appeared the silent signal : the oblong of rosy light, net-
curtained. In a moment we were holding back our laughter,
rueful laughter that told us how much, unawares, we had been
hoping. For here was fear to match our own : the steady
octopus eye, the absurdly waving tenacles of good salesman-
ship. The show was condemning itself in advance. We
breathed freely, we grew magnanimous. We would make
allowances. We were about to see the crude, the newly-born.
We grew wdlling to abandon our demand for the frozen
w^indow-sill in favour of a subscription for a comfortable
cradle. Ages seemed to have passed since we sat facing that
netted oblong, ages since the small curtains had slid apart to
the sound of a distressingly animated conversation. We
had wandered, moralising ; recalled the birth of gramophone
and pianola, remember that a medium is a medium, and that
just as those are justified who attempt to teach us how to
appreciate Music, and the Royal Academy, and Selfridge's
so most certainly, how certainly w^e had not until later any
conception, must those be justified who attempt to teach us
how to hear Talkies. We remembered also Miss Rebecca
West's noble confession of w^illingness to grow accustomed
to listening to speakers all of whom suffer from cleft-palate. . .

Cleft-palate is a fresher coin of the descriptive currency
than the adenoids " worn almost to transparency by the
realists. Nevertheless adenoids, large and powerful, at once
mufflers and sounding-boards, were the most immediate
obstacle to communication between ourselves and the semi-
circle of young persons on the screen, stars, seated ostensibly
in council over speech-films. Their respective mouths opened

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upon their words widely, like those of fish, like those of ven-
triloquists' dummies, those of people giving lessons in lip-
reading. And the normal pace of speech was slowed to
match the effort. The total impression was strong enough
to drive into the background, for clear emergence later, our
sense of what happened to film upon its breaking into speech,
into no matter what imagined perfection of clear speech. For
the moment we could be aware only of effort.

The introductory lesson over, the alphabet presumably
mastered and our confidence presumably gained by the
bevy of bright young people with the manners of those
who ruinously gossip to children of a treat in store,
we were confronted by a soloist, the simulacrum of a tall sad
gentleman who, with voice well-pitched — conquest of
medium ? — but necessarily ( ?) slow and laboriously precise
in enunciation, and with pauses between each brief phrase
after the manner of one dictating to a shorthand-typist, gave
us, on behalf of the Negro race, a verbose paraphrase of
Shylock's specification of the claims of the Jew to be consider-
ed human. He vanished, and here were the cotton-fields :
sambos and mammies at w^ork, piccaninnies at play — film,
restored to its senses by music. Not, this time, the musical
accompaniment possessing, as we have remarked before, the
power, be it never so inappropriate provided it is not obtru-
sively ill-executed, to unify seer and seen and give to what is
portrayed both colour and sound — but music utterly lovely,
that emerged from the screen as naturally as a flower from its
stalk : the voices of the cotton-gatherers in song. Film opera
flowed through our imagination. Song, partly no doubt by
reason of the difference between spoken word and sustained

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sound, got through the adenoidal obstruction and, because
the sound was distributed rather than localised upon a single
form, kept the medium intact. Here was foreshadowed the
noble acceptable twin of the silent film.

The singing ceased, giving place to a dead silence and the
photograph of a cotton-field. The gap, suddenly yawning
between ourselves — flung back into such a seat of such a
cinema on such a date — and the instantly flattened, colourless
moving photograph, featured the subdued hissing of the pro-
jector. Apparatus rampant : the theatre, ourselves, the screen,
the mechanisms, all fallen apart into competitive singleness.
Now for it, we thought. Now for dialogue. Now for careful
listening to careful enunciation and indistinctness in hideous
partnership. A mighty bass voice leapt from the screen, the
mellowest, deepest, tenderest bass in the world, Negro-bass
richly booming against adenoidal barrier and reverberating :
perfectly unintelligible. A huge cotton-gatherer had made
a joke. Four jokes in sucession made he, each smothered in
sound, each followed by lush chorus of Negro-laughter, film
laughter, film-opera again, noble partner of silent film.

And so it was all through : rich Negro-laughter, Negro-
dancing, of bodies whose disforming western garb could not
conceal the tiger-like flow of muscles. Pure film alternating
with the emergence of one after another of the persons of the
drama into annihilating speech. Scenes in which only the
natural dramatic power of the actors gave meaning to what
was said and said, except by a shrill-voiced woman or so and
here and there the piercing voice of a child, in a way fatal to
any sustained reaction : slow, enunciatory, monstrous.

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Perhaps only a temporary necessity, as the fixed expression-
less eyes of the actors — result of concentration on micro-
phone— may be temporary ?

But the hold-up, the funeral march of words, more distract-
ing than the worst achievements of declamatory, fustian
drama, was not the most destructive factor. This was
supplied by the diminution of the faculty of seeing — cinema-
tography is a visual art reaching the mind through the eyes
alone — by means of the necessity for concentrating upon
iiearing the spoken word. Music and song demand only a
distributed hearing which works directly as enhancement
rather than diminution of the faculty of seeing. But concen-
trated listening is immediately fatal to cinematography.
Imagine, to take the crudest of examples, — the loss of power
suffered by representations of passionate volubility — the
virago, the girl with a grievance, the puzzled foreigner — if
these inimitable floods of verbiage could be heard .... In all
its modes, pure-film talk is more moving than heard speech.
Conx^entration upon spoken words reveals more clearly than
anything else the hiatus between screen and stage. In becom-
ing suddenly vocal, locally vocal amidst a surrounding
silence, photograph reveals its photographicality. In
demanding for the films the peculiar attention necessary to
spoken drama all, cinematographically, is lost; for no gain.

The play featured the pathos and humour of Negro life
in the southern States and was, whenever the film had a
chance, deeply moving ; whenever these people were acting,
moving, walking, singing, dancing, living in hope and love
and joy and fear. But the certainty of intermittent dialogue
ruined the whole. When it was over the brightness of our

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certainty as to the ultimate fate of the speech-film was the
brighter for our sense of having found more in a silent film —
seen on the pot-luck system the day before — that happened to
be in every way the awful irreducible minimum, than in this
ambitious pudding of incompatible ingredients.

The photography was good to excellent. Actors all black
and therefore all more than good. A satisfying, sentimental
genre picture — genuinely sentimental, quite free from sen-
timentality— might be made of it by cutting out the speeches
which served only to blur what was already abundantly clear,
and substituting continuous obligato of musical sound.

If the technical difficulties of speech are ultimately over-
come, the results, like the results of the addition to silent film
of any kind of realistic sound, will always be disastrous. No
spoken film will ever be able to hold a candle to silent drama,
will ever be so speaking."

As we were going to press," the August Close Up came
in and we read ]\Ir. Herring's notes on Hearts in Dixie,
Mr. Herring bears a lamp, a torch, electric torch kindly
directed backwards, as boldly he advances amongst the
shadows of w^hat is yet to be, for the benefit of those who fol-
low rallentando. We respect his pronouncements and are
filled, therefore, with an unholy joy in believing that for once-
in-a-w^ay we may blow a statement of his down the wind, down
a north-easter, sans fagon. One does not need to temper
winds to lambs with all their wool in place. Therefore : As
a fair-minded young Englishman Air. Herring is for giving
the Talkies their chance and their due even though his con-
science refuses to allow any claim thev may make for a place
in the same universe as the sound-film proper. He has taken

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the trouble to consider their possibilities. One of these he
finds realised in Hearts in Dixie at the moment when
the white doctor, having drawn the sheet from the body of the
mother who has been treated by a Voodoo woman, and bent
for a moment, scrutinising, stands up with his declaration :

All the time," says ^Ir, Herring, " we see his face. Then
his words cut across, ' she's been dead three days' Xow,
in a silent film, the visual thing would have been broken "
and he concludes his remarks on the incident by describing it
as the odd spectacle of talkies assisting visual continuity."

We do not deny the possibility here suggested, but if this
incident is to stand for realisation then the possibility is not
worth pursuing. For though not quite the stentorian
announcement of the guest-ushering butler, the doctor's state-
ment inevitably had to be announcement, clear announcement
in the first place to us, the audience, and incidentally to the
sorrowing relatives to whom, in actuality let us hope, he
would have spoken rather differently. The shock got home,
not because its vehicle was the word spoken with the tragic
picture still there before our eyes, but by virtue of it un-
expectedness. It would have lost nothing and, relatively
to the method of carefully-featured vocal announcement, have
gained much by being put across in sub-title. But since Mr.
Herring objects that sub-title would have interfered with
visual continuity, we must remind him that the right caption
at the right moment is invisible. It flows unoticed into
visual continuity. It is, moreover, audible, more intimately
audible than the spoken word. It is the swift voice within
the mind. " She's been dead three days " was dramatic,
not cinematographic, and the incident would have gained

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enormously if the white doctor had acted his knowledge of
the unknown death, if he had reverently replaced those sheets
and shown his inability to help. To be sure we should not
have known about the three days. What matter?

Dorothy M. Richardson.

AUTHOR AND TALKIES

The talking picture is a prodigy. A sport. A mutation.
The movie contained within itself no apparent latency of
speech. Its ingenerate muteness, its lack of any rudiment of
vocality, was accepted as the very basis for the development
of cinema art. But now like a bolt from the silent blue it has
squawked forth into speech and song. The effect has been
almost as disconcerting as if an oyster had suddenly opened
its shell and declaimed in unearthly tones, **My name is
Norval."

And to no one has this prodigy been more momentous and
bewildering than to the scenario writer. Trained to think
and to work in terms of pictures, of pantomime, of silent ex-
pression, he finds himself of a sudden confronted with a
distinctly different set of conditions. Under the old regime
to which he had laboriously adapted himself he was at best
offered precious little encouragement. His chances of suc-
cessfully running the gauntlet of the requirements, the

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vagaries, the prejudices, the exactions of a Hollywood pro-
ducer were about one in five thousand. And now with the
advent of the talkies, with all that this departure implies of
new specifications and technique, he does not know for the
moment where he stands nor what his chance may be, if in-
deed, he has any at all.

This perplexity is strikingly reflected in the present
marked falling off of submitted scenarios. There has been a
drop of not less than fifty per cent, in the number of scripts
received by the various Hollywood studios since the inaugu-
ration of audible films. The voluntary contributor, the man
or woman on the outside, seeking to write for the vocal screen,
is in the situation of a wanderer lost in a fog. He does not
know which way to proceed.

Nor are the editors and the producers themselves in much
better shape. They are likewise befogged with uncertainty.
In their groping confusion attendant upon the novelty of
the audible film they are on the one hand blindly discarding
all material that had been accepted or was under considera-
tion for the ^' dummies Avhile on the other hand they declare
they are in the market for material, but at the same time do
not desire that any of it be submitted in form for a talking
play. Which is to say they are still adhering to the restriction
of the dummy era, in inviting from the stranger nothing more
definite or finished than mere plots, outlines or ideas. Their
staff scenarists in conjunction with their recently hired dialog
writers will attend to whipping such sketches into spoken
photoplays.

There is, of course, no encouragement in this for the
aspiring photodramatist. The submitting of a mere skeleton

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outline for a spoken play is as empty of artistic profit as it is
irrational in its requirement. Xo chance here for a budding
Shakespeare. He must be content with offering the boiled-
down plot of a Hamlet or a King Lear and leave the writing
of the lines to a dialog expert.

In their anxiety to meet the unfamiliar and novel situation
that now confronts them, and in the absence of anv guiding
precedent, the producers are availing themselves of the ex-
pedient nearest to hand — the conscripting of established plav-
wrights, both American and European, ensconcing them in
studio cubbyholes, and bidding them under the persuasion of
fat weekly pay-checjues to manufacture so manv feet of dialog
for a given scenario. Also, when not immediatelv engaged
on this hack work, they are expected to hammer out original
masterpieces for the speaking screen. The public must be
served. Some immediate and dependable means must be
employed for fulfilling the vear's schedule.

This is not said in any spirit of disparagement. The pro-
ducers' lot is not a happy one. A studio, like a factory, must
be kept going. Whatever time is needed for developing and
perfecting conditions and meeting new problems must be
snatched in the midst of current manufacture. Hence, the
ambitious outside dramatist with visions of the possibilities
of the speaking screen must bide his time. He must not be
impatient with the caterpillar in his eagerness to secure the
butterfly.

Even now, if he is so minded, he mav sub:nit a photodrama
in full play form ; with dialog and business all carefully
worked out. Xo studio would reject it out of hand for that
reason alone. If it should prove attractive and happen to

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meet the immediate needs of a company, it would probably
be accepted and at a price in excess of what a mere plot sketch
would command.

But this would be a remarkably exceptional circumstance.
So exceptional, indeed, and so unlikely, that no unestablished
writer would be justified in expending on such an effort the
time and labour it would involve.

Moreover, it must be constantly borne in mind that intrinsic
merit alone is not sufficient to insure success in the marketing
of literary w^ares in Hollywood. Nor must this be wholly
attributed to lack of appreciation on the part of cinema editors
and producers. Thousands of recognisedly excellent literary
productions — novels, stories, dramas — are conscionably and
deliberately discarded in the ever eager search for available
screen material. Considerations of which the outsider has no
adequate conception enter into the selecting of such material,
quite aside from any question of its artistic merit.

These considerations involve questions of studio policy,
cost of production, timeliness, public taste, screen per-
sonalities, censorship, box-office demands, foreign markets,
and a score of others of like general character. They far
exceed in number and weight any similar business con-
siderations governing the decisions of magazine editors, book
publishers or stage producers.

The captious and disgruntled author, with his commendable
ideals, needs constantly to be reminded that Hollywood is a
commercial institution. It exists and continues to thrive
because of its ability to make pictures at a financial profit ; and
it has learned through experience and a shrewd understanding
w^hat type and sort of pictures appeal to the masses. Art,

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ideals, culture, education, are but incidental or secondary con-
siderations.

In other words, the author must take Hollywood as he finds
it. He cannot expect to hold it to the standards and conven-
tions of other institutions or traditions. He may scorn its
methods, its attitude, manners; but such scorn only reacts to
his own irritation. It affects Hollywood not in the least.

Whether Hollywood will ever again, following its earlier
practice, offer a welcome to the unknown free-lance scenario
writer is highly problematical. Writing for the screen, pre-
paring a story for the director and the camera-man, is not only
essentially collaborative, but is also of a nature requiring an
intimate knowledge of film conditions, an acquaintanceship
with the technicalities of picture making, and personal con-
tact with the studios. And the advent of the talkies has
accentuated rather than minimised these restrictions.

The author's approach to the screen must continue to be
through the published book or story or the produced stage
play. And if he thus succeeds in coming within hailing dis-
tance, he may be invited to Hollywood. No one can do any
direct scenario work away from Hollywood. And once here he
may be set the task of lending a hand — but no more than
lending a hand — at photodramatising his own work; or

doping out an original screen play; or sitting in on story
conferences with the production boss and his literary carpen-
ters ; or supplying the spoken lines for somebody else's
inarticulate creation ; or he may be asked merely to make
himself generally useful around the story department of the
shop.

But he must not expect under any circumstances to be given

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a free hand to create from beginning to end a finished
scenario complete in all its details. That sort of solo work
passed out a decade ago. Strictly speaking, there is to-day
no such profession as scenario writing — that is, in the sense
that we speak of writing a novel or a play, wherein an author
prepares a finished work directly for presentation to the
public. Jeanie Macpherson, Cecil de Mille's scenarist, is the
only remaining member of the one-time flourishing profession
of scenario writing. She alone continues to write directly and
completely for the screen, beginning with the originating of
the story and following through in every detail to the writing
of the final " Fade-out " of the continuity.

Despite the obvious facts to the contrary, we hear it
perennially stated that the day of the original screen writer is
dawning ; that the Shakespeare of the screen is about to make
his advent. It sounds learned and prophetic and serves to
hearten the trusting outlander. But it is merely one of those
handy cliches that do service in a pinch for the want of some-
thing wiser to say. It has had a special revival since the
advent of the talkies, due to the confusion of ideas created by
the seeming correspondence between the speaking photoplay
and the stage drama.

Time will very clearly demonstrate that such correspon-
dence is only suppositious, or superficial at most. Intrin-
sically there is no identity or dependency between these
two forms of dramatic expression. Their respective media
distinctly differentiate them. And this differentiation will
grow and become increasingly evident as the talkie develops.

There will never be a Shakespeare of the photodrama, for
the simple reason that it is essentially a composite and

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collaborative creation. It must necessarily be so, to meet
the inherent complexities of cinema production ; and the
addition of speech has now added one more complexity
and still further removed the possibility of personal unification
of creativeness.

It has already called into being another specialist, a further
addition to the coterie of minds and specialised talents re-
quired in the building of a scenario. Together with the plot
originator, the story fabricator, the treatment writer, the title
writer, the continuity writer, the gag man, the supervisor of
production, the editor, the production manager, the technical
director, the art director, the research director, the censorship
expert, and the picture director, the dialog writer has now his
special part as a contributor to the finished whole.

Only by a thorough realisation of the complete uniqueness
of the photodrama can the author view the situation com-
placently. So long as he persists in appraising the screen by
the norms and refinements of the world of letters, just so long
will he continue to be disquieted and resentful, and regard
Hollywood as hopeless. But once he is properly oriented and
becomes conscious of the fact that the cinema is a world apart,
he will either leave Hollywood alone or accept the conditions
as they necessarily there exist.

If he sells the film rights to his book or his play, he must
not expect to see his work translated to the screen in its origi-
nal version. If he deceives himself with any other expectation
it were better for his peace of soul that he refuse to accept the
twenty-five thousand dollars and content himself with a snap
of his artistic fingers.

Or, if he be lured to Hollywood to write for the screen, let

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him at once abandon all thought of being lionised or accorded
the attention and amenities that attach to authorship in the
cloistered realm of literature. Hollywood knows nothing
about such traditional niceties, and cares less. Its manners
and outlook are those of the frontier — practical, utilitarian,
democratic, self-assured, aggressive. A writer here is merely
one o' them writin' fellers." He simply has his place in
picture-making along with the electrician and the make-up
man. If he cannot tolerate this, cannot adapt himself to it, let
him take warning in time and remain at home. Hollywood
will not miss him.

Clifford Howard.

SUR LES ECRANS GENEVOIS

II n'est peut-etre pas inutile, a I'heure ou le cinema som-
meille et ou le public, lasse, deserte les salles obscures pour
retrouver la vie palpable, de faire un petit examen retrospectif
de la saison 1928-1929. L'evenement en fut la projection
libre, enfin ! des films russes, saluee par les clameurs
apeurees de quelques-uns exploitee aussi, il faut le dire
franchement, parle parti socialiste.

Menace pour ceux-ci, stimulation pour ceux-la . . il ne
restait guere de place pour le cinephile desireux de jouir en

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paix des qualites esthetiques des bandes de Pudowkine,
Preobrashenskaja ou Ozep. Le public, en general, n'apprecia
guere le style impitoyablement cru, le pessimisme, si objectif
pourtant, de LaCarte ]aune, duV illage du Peche. II apprecia
moins encore la sobriete, la simplicite des faits exposes, des
attitudes. La profondeur reelle n'est pas plus son fait que
ne Test Tanalyse poussee du caractere humain. Le public,
de fagon generale, veut de la distraction facile, des spectacles
qui ne requierent qu'une attention minime, des sujets legers
comme aussi de legeres toilettes. De la la vogue, pourtant
attenuee aujourd'hui, des " plats doux " americains.

II serait injuste pourtant d'englober tous les spectateurs
dans cette premiere categoric car nombreux sont aussi ceux
qui apprecierent le film sovietique, non pour son caractere
politique, je le r6pete, mais pour les richesses visuelles qu'il
contient. Les paysages, les ciels en particulier, de F. Ozep
plongerent plus d'un spectateur dans un ravissement d^extase.
La verite si intense du jeu des acteurs fut une autre source
d'etonnement et de joie, tout comme les paralleles de pensees
et d'images chers a Pudowkine. Citons encore, parmi
les films russes projetes en seances publiques : Tevipete
Sur UAsie Le Feu Sur la Volga et Le Cadavre Vivant . . .
et en seances privees : Dura Lex et Potemkin.

Les Russes abandonnent deja les motifs propagandistes . . .
et c'est un bien car ainsi nous ne serons plus partages entre
deux camps politiques, et Tart cinegraphique ne souffrira
aucunement d'une orientation nouvelle.

Puisque nous sommes si severes a I'egard des films
americains, n'hesitons pas a blamer ceux qui, dans la meme
production, peuvent realiser de fort belles choses comme La

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Toison D^or, La FoiUe, L^Aurore, Solitude, Une Femme Dans
Chaque Port, a cote d'innombrables romans-feuilletons pour
concierges. King Vidor et Paul Fejos, auteurs respectifs
de La Foule et de Solitude, ne sont plus autorise a produire
autre chose que des oeuvres fortes, d'inspiration virile.
Craignons seulement que les sonorites filmees noient a tout
jamais ces premiers tentatives honorables des techniciens
d' Outre- Atlantique.

De France, nous sont venus Therese Raquin, Jeanne
d' Arc, V Equipage ,Le Chapeau de Paille V Italic, que nous
pouvons classer sans hesitation parmi les meilleurs films de
1928. Qui done pourrait douter de I'avenir du cinema
frangais et du talent des Jeunes cineastes qui, a Paris,
gagnent a peine leur vie, il est vrai, mais dont la perseverance
triomphera finalement de 1' indifference, de la mauvaise
volonte meme des financiers du film. L'on s'apercevra bien,
un jour, Dieu veuille que ce soit le plus tot possible ; que ces
jeunes-la sont les seuls susceptibles d'entretenir la vitalite du
cinema fran^ais et de lui permettre de tenir tete aux avalanches
de pellicules americaines. II faut surtout, pour cela, que
toute liberte leur soit laissee au studio et pour le choix des
scenarios.

L'Allemagne, elle, nous envoie ses specialites techniques
signees presque exclusivement Fritz Lang : Metropolis, Les
Espions, Si le sens de la mesure n'est pas toujours
suffisamment observe, si Ton affectionne trop souvent une
certaine obscurite, ce n'est pourtant pas aux depens de Teffet
general des films. Le moins qu'on puisse en dire est qu'ils
sont construits solidement, etonnent par leurs proportions
massives et ne manquent jamais d'impressionner fortement

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rimagination des spectateurs. Bien differents de ceux-la
sont les films de Pabst, d'origine viennoise il est vrai. Crise ;
Jeanne Ney se font valoir par leurs finesses. Le dernier,
surtout, est reellement transcendant.

Pu nombre des meilleurs documentaires, citons : Chang,
qui tint I'affiche assez longtemps et revint sans lasser le
public, Perdus An Pole, Expedition de Sauvetage du
Krassine. Et tout dernierement, Berlin, de W. Ruttmann,
qui, dans une modeste salle, doubla le cap de la semaine.

Freddy Che valley.

PLASTIC DESIGN

Whatever you may think of Erich Pommer's supervision,
(remember he is paid to make money, not lose it), and Hans
Schwartz's powers of intelligent direction ; whatever your
criticism (it will be personal) of Brigitte Helm, Lederer, and
Warwick Ward, you will agree that the architecture of Nina
Petrovna, better known as The Wonderful Lie, is worthy of
record. Art-direction such as this does not come your way
every day. In those souvenir programmes, almost useless,
we remain unacquainted with the designers. Set design,
according to Messrs. Gaumont-British, who are the English
distributors, and therefore responsible, is of no importance.
There was no credit title.

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But from the knowledge of our memories we supplv the
names of the pair of designers in German studios who have
achieved so much in the past. Of Herren Waker Rohrig
and Robert Herlth's early history and apprenticeship I know
little, save that Rohrig, together with Herman Warm and
Walter Reimann, was an art-director to Robert Wiene on
Caligari, and that is some time ago.

Of their combined work in Faust, ]\Ir. Alacpherson, vour
editor says effects of pure Diirer-esque engraving-

touched up with Breughel .... Diirer was in the interiors
. . . . " He is referring in particular to the camera, but un-
consciously, I hazard, to the settings, and the amazing-
mediaeval and yet modern atmosphere created by them.

In 1925, with Tartuffe, their work came to be noticed.
Later, here in London, it was discreetly referred to by the
critics who matter. For instance, in The Architectural Review
of January, 1929, we read, " . . . . the simple but baroque
setting, the air of elegance, the domestic ornaments, the
draperies . . . . " and it is spoken of with unstinted praise,
but the names of their creators are omitted. To those who
have shellacked a floor (S.X. board), or erected a handrail
(old stock), in England, the tone of this design, (Tartuffe)^
the exquisite beauty of its detail, the moulded plasterwork so
typically German, (it is done on the floor and not in the
plasterer's shop, and therein lies the dift>rence) the carefully
wrought ironwork, the properties which harmonise even to
the smallest detail, (remember Elmire's ring) these are
all something worth while. They are design, knowledge,
architecture, tone, modernism, plastic value, and TASTE.
Rohrig and Herlth do not imitate the eighteenth century.

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They look at it from a twentieth century viewpoint.
Contrast, for a moment, Madame Pompadour and Tartuffe
and you will realise.

I pass over Looping the Loop and come to Nina Petrovna
and stop. Those travelling shots of Hoffmann, with the
camera almost realising Mr. Blakeston's suggestion of
human personification, nosing into every corner (pity poor
Brigitte) would have nothing but mere technical accomplish-
ment and mechanical dexterity to support them if it were
not for the creative minds of Rohrig and Herlth. The lay-
out of the sets, they are not easy to diagnose with a travelling
shot and the camera turning on itself, was designed entirely
around these moving camera evolutions.

In the fat bulging cornices and rich swelling mouldings,
we perceive the work of Rohrig and Herlth. We find it
again in the twist of the staircase in Petrovna's house, (how
could Schwartz mistake his shooting angles?) the struggling
cherubs on the newel post, the curtains festooned over the
doorways, the curving astricles of the panels on the door
behind the Helm's head (close up), the massive but
eminently suitable furniture (plaster) in and about the bed-
room and boudoir. Once more in the night-club, or
wherever the loose virtue congregated in pre-war Russia, a
curving staircase, so apt for Warwick Ward to descend, and
a plashing fountain, so near and yet so far from the early
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer period, (forgive me, Mr. Coward.)
These, and a lot more are the work of Rohrig and Herlth. I
decline to answer if they were responsible for the wicked
painted backcloths.

I do not know the workings of Rohrig and Herlth, their

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plans, their elevations, their methods, their carpenters, and
their plasterers, but I do know the results and I know that
they are good. Confusion may surround the building of
their sets, as it does in every studio, but creative designing
will come through the mire and triumph. Despite circum-
stances, Alfred Jiinge achieved something at Elstree. Did
you ever see his music-room for Piccadilly ? Go and look
again, then.

Rohrig and Herlth are not content with one drawing for
a set design. They conceive hundreds, of every little
corner, of the action, of the movement, of the lighting ;
nothing is left out and every detail is considered. What
did they think of Elstree? I cannot tell you but they con-
structed models for Robison's Informer. The rest is being
done there. But not by them. Good luck to it.

Paul Rotha.

BITS AND PIECES

The London cine Amateurs are disorganised into bits and
pieces. They have half a dozen individual clubs in London
alone, and the smallness of their size generates a bunch of
problems which retards progress.

In each club there is a mere handful of members of widely
different intelligences, and there are not enough of them to

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fall naturally into units who would produce films suitable
to their own stage of advancement. The one or two most
energetic people Avho do get going, seem to be overcome
Avith delight at being at the helm of the ship, and hatch
ambitious five reel stories which, normallv would require
only a few players, but actually have to accommodate the
remaining members of the club, who would otherwise be at
a loose end for ' something to do Such a state of affairs
unbalances the most cool headed storv, and the resulting-
scenario progresses like a car on five wheels.

The small club . has small finances. Film negative is
scarce, with the result that a film normallv occupving five
reels has ro be squeezed into two reels of animate tableaux.
The nett result is a waste of time.

I have noticed a fine photographer in club A, a good
director in club B, and a tip-top scenario writer in club C.
We might see results if they would only get together, but,
usually, they have not even met each other. As it is, the
poor photographer has to do almost everything, including
some of the acting. The unfortunate director was also at
his wits' end last time I saw him. It is too bad to have to
direct a scene fraught with Freudian complexes, while
bullying a consumptive arc into an occasional splutter !

It is true that improvement would follow more efficient
organisation within even the smallest clubs, but, if such
organisation should exist, how far would it be useful to so
small a unit. 3^Iuch of the energy of the organisers, which
might have beneficial effects on a wide circle of people,
would be frittered away upon a small community.

Amalgamation will solve many problems of the amateur.

CLOSE UP

The many members of one London club would naturally
shake down into stratas. The handful of adventurous
leaders would each become a sign post to which would be
attracted members at their own stage of progress. The
resulting team competition spirit would introduce one of
the strongest urges towards progress.

In two clubs I know of, the beginners often feel unhappy.
They find everything in the hands of one or two noisy
people, and are frightened away, because they do not find
enough folks like themselves to generate the team spirit.

But a National Convention of amateurs is planned to take
place in the late autumn in London. I hear that the
response to the idea is very encouraging indeed. This is
great news. All praise be to ^h, T. J. Wilson, secretary
of the Amateur Cinematographers Association, who is
taking a leading part in organising the Convention. It is
going to be a big job fitting the bits and pieces together,
and it seems that manv would-be useful pieces will stay
apart for some while yet.

Really constructive competitions are being arranged, and
it is hoped to lay the foundations of a central organisation,
including a librarv (films and books), studio, club rooms,
etc.

Now we are getting a chance to move. Will it be taken?

Orltox West.

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COMMENT AND REVIEW

Films in History. — Xo. 3.

La Petite Marchande d'AIumettes/'

Directed by : Jean Renoir.
Settings by : Eric Aes.

Mme. Rosemonde Gerard and Maurice Rostand took
the matter to the High Courts. They told the Bench that Jean
Tedesco, in producing La Petite Marchande d'Ahunettes, had
infringed the copyright of a play they had written. M.
Tedesco said, that possibly M. Renoir had been influenced,
but by Andersen rather than Rostand. In catty manner (his
film has been held up a whole year on account of legal pro-
ceedings) he further opined that Rostand had found some of
his ideas at the same source.

The picture is quite a charming fairy tale.

Catherine Hessling fails to sell a match, she dare not go
home. She shelters behind a loose plank resting against a
house. After shots of the tumble-down shack, which does
duty for her home — the chimney pot draped in mid-air — we
feel that she has not done so badlv for herself. In the elfin

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tradition of Catherine Hessling she peeps out from behind the
plank, half an eye and a pouting mouth.

She walks along in bedroom slippers, she tucks her arms
under her arm-pits.

The handsome hero nearly buys a match-box and the
Hessling's Hesslingisms. Rich friends drag him into a tea-
shop. Frost on the glass rubbed off and the Hessling sees
a lap-dog being fed on expensive cake.

She has a dream in the snow. She splits up, divides into
two, dances with herself in the avant-garde manner ; dances
into the land of toys.

The camera is kept very low on the ground and speckled
tops spin in the foreground. Catherine rolls away a coloured
ball, rockets Jack from his box, makes the wooden soldiers
believe that they have been engaged for the Chauve-Souris,
sets the dancers dancing and the prince courting, hangs stars
and moon in cardboard heaven.

It is dangerous to play with toys ; they disappoint or break.
Jack has a row with the prince. Ears of the woolly dog fall
down. The fairy tale, as it takes us behind the scenes, gives
inside dope on why the sturdy dolly falls to pieces in nurse's
gentle hand. The callous child does not realize that dolly
may be committing suicide on account of unrequited love.
So it is dangerous to play with toys ; it gives life to them and

life means For a moment we thought that we were

writing the titles for the film !

Catherine shatters her toyland. Line of nine-pin soldiers
fall down. The prince is chased by Jack-in-the-box. Across
the clouds, reeling and spinning, the prince falls to land. A
rose tree covers the grave of Catherine.

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To make the event of greater historical importance Rene \
Clair might have joined in ; his Voyage Imaginaire has

analogies. Clair introduces satire. Characters from a provin- |

cial bank let loose in an enchanted palace, crawling on !

ceilings. Balloons straining upwards, truly dreamlike. But ■

Clair has got no shots of the Hessling lighting matches to i

warm herself in the snow; symbol of her personality which i

flashes up to warm what exhibitors call our heart." i

OSWELL BlAKESTON. j

(Mr. Stuart Davis has booked this fihii for the Avenue \

Pavilion. Ed,) \

Films in History. — No. 4.

U Homme Du Large.

Directed by : Alarcel L'Herbier.
Made : 1920 in June and July.

For once I w^ould change it to History of Films, Le
Torrenty El Dorado, Don Juan and Faust ; the early L'Herbier
films did make a difference ! L^Homme Du Large was one of
the best.

The white streets and hats call for a frame ; old Dutch
masters. There is no overflowing of the picture, no running
beyond the edges of the screen and mingling of character and
drama w^ith the spectator.

Walking through a classical picture gallery one is struck

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by the way in which so many artists see everything dead-on.
Instead of using angles, L'Herbier experimented with fancy
iris effects to break away

The vow of the man who will have nothing to do with the
world is the vow of the man who belongs to the sea. He edu-
cates his child himself, but the boy is recreant. Stealing
money from the saintly sister, dancing while the orchestra
plays funeral music for his mother, he behaves none too well ;
and his father, to show his disgust, finally half strangles him
and turns him adrift in an open boat.

There is much that strikes home in the shots of the cockle-
shell boat, rustling out into shavings of a metal sea.

Jacques Catelain is said to have given his best performance
in this picture : it is arresting.

The story is told pleasantly in successive tablaux.
U Argent probably cost twelve times as much and is more
than twelve times worse. Even from a box-office angle it
fails. A dramatic point of the story shows an aviator starting
on a long-distance flight. The man in the street — the man in
the street in the cinema — is expected to become excited about
the results of the expedition. Will he get there? Will he
crash? A shot of an aeroplane travelling in the clouds. He
is there ! Now is that value at the box-office ? The audience
knows that he has not made the flight. If the aeroplane had
crashed, in firework manner," it would have been
box-officely cinematic but the other is simply the bunk.

It would be an excellent thing if some directors went to see
their contributions to film history, and they might find some
entertainment after the carking hours of rushes.

OSWELL BlAKESTON.

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A FILM THAT SHOULD BE MADE FROM A

BOOK.

•

Mr. A. Zwemmer of Charing Cross Road has just issued
an English edition of a sensational book dealing with Art
forms in Nature.

The book contains a series of photographs by Professor
Karl Blossfeld with an introduction by Karl Nierendorf.
The photographs consist of greatly magnified reproductions
from plant life and were expressly taken to show the amazing
relationship which exists between all art forms and natural
phenomena.

Renger-Patzsch stressed the aesthetic pleasure to be
derived from symmetrically grouped petals and leaves, and
Professor Blossfeld has caught with his camera wonderful
white mists spaced out with star-shaped foliage, thistles which
might have been transferred to the paper from the silk of a
flag so balanced are they in detail, and primly bunched
rosettes from the Art and Craft shops.

But with unparalleled care and patience the professor goes
further. He shows that In the blade of grass, in the
tree-trunk, in the flower, lives and works the same struc-
tural urge as in the brain, the nerves and the hands of man-
kind.'*

Prototypes of every style of historic ornament can easily
be recognized. A fern, before it is fully unfurled, suggests
a bishop's crosier ; pods on a long stem have the rhythmic
quality of a classical dance-group ; a segment of a stalk,
drained of its sap, might be the crown of a king ; a close up
of a branch reveals characteristics of a totem pole, two

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strangely comic faces adorned by bulbous noses and
fantastic head-dresses; fluted growths might be Chinese
pagodas or sugar cakes, others have a more monumental
quality ; there are leaves as formally designed as any church
window.

Modern art is represented by a mandrake which recalls
the gestures of a dancer, by poppy heads like futurist lamp-
shades, and by a cork-screwing vine tendril which is related
to the wire sculpture of Alexandra Calder.

British Instructional Films, who have given us so many
magnificent documents of plant life, ought to feel inspired by
such a book to attempt the decorative side of Nature, only
such a film must have the motivation which holds together
Professor Blossfeld's lovely collection of stills.

O SWELL BlAKESTOX.

DIE WELT 1ST SCHON.

Albert Renger-Patzsch exhibited at Stuttgart. A book of
his has been published under the title. Die Welt 1st Schdn.

In an introduction we are told that Renger-Patzsch is not
a portrait photographer. ^'But," the writer asks ingenuously,
''are not animals and flowers more interesting than men?"
The same writer picks out for special praise a picture of steps,
which might suggest sea waves, leading to a suspension-
bridge at Dresden ; and a magnification of the heart of a plant
which is strangely architectural.

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We should have chosen the tiny, snow-laden branches of
pine trees, the Chinese-puzzle snake, the three sick apes, some
of his groups of frying pans and tiles, or the hands clasped
in prayer.

We may be misled by the selection in the book, but we
should say that the two things which mark out the work of
Renger-Patzsch are : a hatred of stunts and double exposure,
and a peculiar trick of weaving his background into his fore-
ground. Apart from some trees, stereoscopically grouped,
his landscapes deliberately pattern on to one surface.

Most of the things which Renger-Patzsch makes us
examine we know already to be beautiful (fox-gloves, tigers,
negro children), but after inspecting a hundred photographs
under one cover w^e felt cheered and grateful.

O.B.

SECOND THOUGHTS ON PUDOVKIN AS ACTOR.

Publicity departments do not trouble much about highly
charged word mechanisms. The Living Corpse was produced
by the GREAT Ozep and featured the WONDERFUL
Pudovkin (vide synopsis). The information was also thrown
in that Mr. Pudovkin had directed many Russian pictures
including Potemkin !

On the w^hole we did not feel inspired to rush into print, the
picture did not come to us as a thyndwrckxpz (thank you Mr.
Joyce) on the other hand we want to give every encourage-
ment to Pro Patria who are presenting this film as the first of
a series of Russian subjects.

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Rumours had reached Close Up many months a^o thai: the
morahty of this picture was a little dated, so let us be content
with a hint that Ozep is not quite so great in this one, or
Pudovkin so wonderful.

O.B.

ON LOOKING AT BRIGITTE HELM.

One can go to see the pictures or one can go to see Brigitte
Helm. This is forced on one because of the pictures in
which the Helm now appears.

The Society Scandal would not have made critics leave hom.e
had the Helm been saved from one of those film star dances
which set a whole audience clapping, although they make the
real audience motherly or mad, and given a part worthy of
her beauty.

We cannot believe that the Helm could starve, could be a
victim of all these male villains. It is so obvious that the girl
could make herself economically independent by going on the
pictures.

There was the old father in the Banky's talkie who wailed
because he had no money to give his daughter, and all the
time we wanted to say to him, You silly fool you could
make a fortune doing that on the pictures.'' But it is terrible
that these short-sighted supervisors should be treating the
Helm like this.

O.B.

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THE EPSTEIN BOOM.

The cineastes have been twittering about Finis Terrae, The
Fall of the House of Usher and the great Mr. E. who made
them both.

Without any notice an Epstein was shown in the heart of
London at a little cinema. It was called The Lion of
Mongolia.

A prologue introduced the East which makes us at once
think of the West. It became visible when the hero prince
was pursued by pursuers through a forest (not far from Paris)
decorated with rosettes pinned to homely oaks and spruce
firs. Some of the dresses, however, were fanciful but spoilt
by photography as hard as it could be without cutting the
screen.

The story concerned a film company. They used a Pathe.
The villian ran the show and said. I'll get him, damn his
soul, I'll get him." At least his expression was equal to it.
Ivan Mosjoukine and the Lissenko looked older than one
could have imagined they will look in ten years time.

Now if it had been, that which we are always urging a film
should be, something from life, it might have technically
dated but it would have kept a value as history of fashion,
thought, custom : but it is a feuilleton, it not only dates it
bores.

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

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xAIETROPOLIS " IN WOOLLIES.
Life in 1940.

If only they had paid more attention to sound recording in
< iO we might have been spared the effects of actors in need
throat pastilles.

.Ve could go through this picture giving a documenta-
;ii of the absurdities and failures in imagination of the art

department and production staff, but we do not think High

" 'eason is worth the space.

There is one attempt to show that Potemkin has been

heard of : the sequence of CLOSE L^PS after the bombs
e been let loose on the head-quarters of the Peace
5sion. Blood streaming from the mouths, and all the rest,
1 the same old extras instead of Air. Eisenstein's types.

O. B.

\ THOUGHT OX THE " MYSTIC MIRROR " AND
BIG SCREENS.

With Magnafilm the director will be able to complete
hi.^ action without breaks, which will be especially valuable
in musical pictures where the additional screen area will also
be a tremendous asset in picturing ensemble numbers."

Could you imagine quick cuts on an enlarged screen ?

'Ve thought just how much Magnafilm will change the
u of the director when we were w^atching Carl Hoffman's
Mvstic Mirror at the Avenue Pavilion . . .The great names

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in the cameraworld, Freund, Wagner, Hoffman, they
understand how to make use of the limitations of the silver
sheet. Look at the groups of heads, the trees, and the
lonely rushes in the Mystic Mirror, To amplify one
example there is a shot of the servant girl pushed into a room
where the master of the castle is conducting an orgy. Fritz
Rasp has not seen the girl before, he bends right forward
and up (w^e know that it is to keep him in the picture with the
girl at the door), and he looks like some gargoyle springing
from the wall, which is in this case, the edge of the screen.
The whole composition would be too bloated on a big
surface, so would most of the angles that are arresting.

We welcome the new but we point out there will be a
change. Sweeps of staircase and tiny figures might be
most effective on the new canvas.

O. B.

ONE SWALLOW.

We have at last turned out a picture that can be looked at
and listened to without wondering why we paid money to
come in to see the damned thing. And the British cinema
world W'ill not let us forget it. Each time they are boiled
by the Press for some fresh indiscretion they will say in a
pained way: ''But how can you have forgotten that
Blackmail was a British' film ?"

There are nice things in Blackmail and not all of them are
in sound, or in the gossip of the lady who keeps on saying

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KNIFE. For example the heroine is steahng from the
house where she has stabbed her would-be seducer the camera
m.ixes from the interior to the exterior in such a way that she
is facing herself, opening the door on herself. The
suspense of the scene is can she get out without being seen?
When the door opened and the girl, in a slow mix, peered
at herself, at least one old dame near us cried UUUUH !

If only we could all go ahead and forget that we had made
one fair film. Perhaps it would be a good thing if a general
reference were made to the British stills in July's Close Up,

O. B.

BOOK REVIEW.

A BLUE BOOK OF NON-THEATRICAL FILMS.

The publishers of Educational Screen have sent us a little
book cataloguing, with a certain amount of selection, films
which can be hired in America by owners of private
projectors.

Both films of 35 and 16 millimetre are included.
Some of the descriptions, which are printed after each title,
have a humour of an unintentional kind.
For example : —

Working for Dear Life, Compares necessity for
giving automobile regular overhauling to man's need for
periodic health examination.

Sniffle Snuffles. Simple facts about the common
cold : told with living silhouttes and cartoon animation.

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The Last Rose of Summer, Tom Moore's immortal
masterpiece pictorized.''

Still it is in every way an admirable effort and it should
be paralleled in England. There is far too much uncertainty
in Wardour Street about which pictures belong to which
firms. We know of one vault stacked with possible finds,
and the owners cannot tell you what films they own, or what
films they are supposed to own, or even definitely say
whether they have a smuggled copy of Potemkin amongst
the debris! Well, old man, you know w^e might. Can't
say for sure. Difficult to keep track of stuff, old man.")

One Thousand and One Films is sold for 75 cents a copy
and can be obtained from 5, South Wabash Avenue.
Chicago.

O. B.

NO INDULGENCES.

The cinema world had the nearest approach to a pretty
scene that has occurred in London since the showing of the
Pudovkin films, when it was announced a few minutes before
the actual time of screening that Martin Luther could not.
be trade-showm. A number of clergymen had gathered,
plus wives, plus families and surrounded the excellent and
elegant commissionaire who, in mufti, they mistook for the
manager. Outside, a film-camera turned. A lady w4th a
red " Workers of the World Unite " peace-badge became

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eloquent on the subject of censorship millstones in connec-
tion with drowning, and various hissing complaint^ lose
from black-coated gentlemen about " The Italian Mission
Cardinal Bourne " and utter want of freedom
They don't want the truth shown " said someone with the
air of discovering something. " They " may be anyone,
but the rather antique variety of the pronoun represented
by the censorship certainly don't, even whatever is in M.
Luther : it is pleasant to think that one section at least of the,
or a, Church have come to blows with the censor. Many
films are cut or forbidden for being irreligious : of the
reverse, we have had /oan, for one thing, not shown, and we
now have Luther banned on other grounds. The Taj
Mahal film is supposed to have caused offence in India; it
may have been banned there. It hasn't been here, I don't
know if it has been booked. It is a British film.

Now Luther isn't a great film, but it has received, as bad
books do on being suppressed, a great deal of publicity. So
has the Avenue, which is embarking on a season of French
works, with the films of the two serious Frenchmen, Epstein
and Clair : Germaine Dulac's picture of the shell and the
clergyman w^ill probably also be seen by hundreds of clerical
visitors who were made acquainted with their existence by
this morning's wait in the foyer. So, everything turns
out for the best — or nearlv everything." As Luther was not
passed in time. The Living Corpse was put on, but that has
no connection with' the previous sentence.

R. H.

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PHOTO-GENESIS.

A collection tracing all man's efforts to depict movement
is for sale in London. It is that famous collection formed
during the last thirty years by Will Day, who by dint of
having scouts active for him almost evervwhere has succeeded
in running to earth many pieces of early apparatus that would
otherwise have jerked into rust on junk-heaps. The famous
animal on a cave wall in Spain (isn't it?) with many legs
given it by an artist trying to show it running ... a Chinese

shadowgraph of the year 200 ... a Thaumotrope

pictures taken by row of cameras with threaded shutters . . .
many Friese Greene relics .... and one of those many
pieces of the First Film (how long it must have been). Films
occur too, but are not an important part of the collection,
which deals with the means by which the illusion of move-
ment is given, and so concentrates on apparatus.

It is an exciting thing that ]\Ir. Day has done, and it was
even more exciting if vou think what the cinema was then,
when he began it. Most of us weren't conscious and a dis-
gusting nimiber of those who were weren't movie-conscious.
Quite a lot of us mightn't have been, either. Consider the
reception given to the invention of talkies — the invention, not
the almost always abominable product.

The collection is to be sold in one lot by ^lessrs Harris and
Gillow, who estimate it at a quarter of a million pounds.
But though it would have this value to film-students, it can
hardly be expected to have it for the kind of person who buys
firsts of Alice in Wonderland and will probably go for several
less thousands, which alters our opinion of ]\Ir. Day's

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interesting foresight and gallant collection not one whit.
It doesn't seem a bad chance for the British Empire Film
Institute to distinguish itself; that body must do something
to restore its dignity after collecting Sorrell and Son on
account of its beautiful English scenerv .... and what else?

R. H.

HOLLYWOOD NOTES.

L^niversal Company have acquired the film rights to All
Quiet on the Western Front. Five or six other Hollywood
companies submitted bids for the book, which has created as
great a stir in America as it has in Europe. Preparations
for its filming are alreadv well under way, with a view to

completing the picture before the end of the year.

^ ^ ^

George Arliss has completed his vitaphone production of
The Green Goddess for Warner Brothers and is now in the
midst of the filming of his most celebrated stage play,
Disraeli. ^Irs. Arliss, as she did on the stage, plavs the role
of Disraeli's wife. The cast includes also two other British
players — David Torrence (in the character of the manager of
the Bank of England) and Anthony Bushnell, a recent

acquisition to Hollywood's foreign colony.

* * *

The Thirteenth Chair, directed by Tod Browning, is
a forthcoming M-G-M mystery play. Its locale is Calcutta,

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and an added touch of realism is given to the picture by the
inclusion in its cast of Lai Chand Mehra, a nephew of Swami
Pranavenanda, and a member of the family of Prince Raj
Kumur, of Sahaspri. In addition to taking part in the picture
he is acting as technical adviser in its production.

Experience has shown that phonofilm comedies require
careful timing to allow for the laughs of the audience. This
is by no means an easy task, as reactions vary in different
audiences. A joke that may produce prolonged laughter and
applause in Boston or New York may evoke only a titter in
Los Angeles or Chicago. The best that can be done in
anticipation of such variations is to strike an approximate
medium of time lapse in the dialog. To this end Paramount-
Lasky, in their Two Black Crows comedy film, try out each
play in rehearsal performance before the picture is shot, with
two different sets of auditors, each made up of several hundred
movie extras. The effect of each joke or gag is carefully noted

as to time, and this is used as a guide in the filming.

* *

Warner Brothers are planning to add to the long list of
revues already filmed. This is The Show of Shows, and as its
title indicates is intended to be the creme de la creme of this
type of picture. One of its striking features will be the
appearance in it of all of the company's leading actors. These
will include John Barrymore, George Arliss, Al Jolson, Irene

Bordini and others of equal stellar magnitude.

* * *

The camera cloak " is replacing the sound-proof booths
for shielding the noise of camera cranking. This consists of

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a heavv felt covering and offers the advantage of permitting
the camera-man to be in closer touch with the scenes he is
shooting than has heretofore been possible with the unwieldy
booth.

* * *

Paramount Lasky are filming the operetta. The Vagabond
King. Ludwig Berger is directing it. The leading roles are
played by Jeanette MacDonald and Dennis King, both

recruited from the musical stage.

* * *

The rights to La Bataille de Dames have been purchased by
^I-G-M, and this celebrated European play will shortly go
into film production.

^ ^ ^

Lionel Barrymore is directing John Gilbert in his forth-
coming M-G-M picture, Olympia, adapted form Ferenc
Molnar's play of the same title.

Hollywood has discovered through a recent careful analysis
of public taste, that there are five major themes of popular
interest in pictures. These, ranked according to their degree
of popularity, are Love, Mystery, Music, Disaster, Adven-
ture. The advent of the talkies has brought the mystery
photodrama well up to the front, and there is not one of the
large studios that is not turning out thrillers, to the enjoyment
of the crowd and the financial profit of the producers.

Lon Chaney, who, with Charlie Chaplin, has signed a
pledge never to do a talkie, will next be seen, but not heard
in a picturization of Alajor Zinov Peckhoff's The Bugle

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Sounds. It is a story dealing with the Foreign Legion, in
North Africa. George Hill, the director, sometime ago made
a special trip to the actual scenes of the book and secured
many thousands of feet of atmospheric shots. The actual
picture, however, is being made at the M-G-M studios and
on location in Arizona.

The " symphonies under the stars " in the Hollywood
Bowl have become one of the established institutions of
Hollywood. Largely financed and patronized by the film
colony, these out-of-door symphony concerts given during the
summer weeks are nightly attended by large crowds, ranging
in numbers from fifteen to twenty thousand for each concert.
The Bowl is an enormous natural amphitheatre in the hills
immediately back of Hollywood. The conductors during the
present season have been Bernardino Molinari, of Rome,
Eugene Goosens, of London, and Bruno Walter, of Berlin.

C.H.

NEW EDUCATIONAL FILMS FROM UFA.

Secrets of the Egg-Shell ox Heligoland.

Dr. Ulrich K. T. Schulz, photographer P. Krien and Miss
Hertha Jiilich, the microscope expert of the Ufa Kultur
Dept., are staying on the island of Heligoland to take a
number of interesting pictures of biological processes at the

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State Biological Institute. First of all a number of important
nautic-biological pictures will be taken for the new Ufa
educational-super Secrets of the Egg-Shell, showing the
development of various North Sea fish beginning with the
egg. Pictures will also be taken for another educational,
entitled Development in a Round About Way, showing the
various phases of development of the sea-urchin, the craw-
fish, the lobster and other sea-creatures.

* * ^

Bobby ox the Screen.

Bobby," the only orang-utan baby living in Europe,
plays the leading part in a new Ufa-educational What
Animals Can be Taught, which has been produced by Dr.
Ulrich Schulz at the Zoological Garden of Nuremberg.

Bobby is the only orang-utan baby which has been suc-
cessfully raised in Europe, every other effort having so far
failed in the European climate. Although " Bobby's "
mother died soon after he was born, " Bobby," lived on to
become a great screen star.

Some very interesting pictures were also taken at the
Nuremberg Zoo showing the life and activities of sea-lions
with a slow-motion lens. The opportunites were unusual
as Nuremberg has the largest collection of sea-lions in
Europe.

* *

Dr. Ulrich K. T. Schulz Finished His 100th
Educational.

The Ufa Kultur Dept. has completed another educational
entitled City-Animals, This picture portrays the interesting

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life and behaviour of manv semi-wild animals still living:
amidst highest civilization in the world's largest cities.
Squirrels, wild-ducks, sea-gulls, singing-birds, swallows and
many others, all dwellers in the German capital, are not
generally observed in the turmoil of metropolitan traffic life,
vet thev are there and mav be seen in this hi2:hlv interesting
and fascinating film. Dr. Ulrich K. T. Schulz and Wolfram
Junghans directed this picture, which is the hundredth
educational production completed by Dr. Schulz during his
long experience as an Ufa-educational expert.

* * *

Games and Danxes in the Animal Life.

Wolfram Junghans is taking a number of interesting shots
for the new Ufa-educational Games and Dances in the Animal
Life, at the Ufa-Kultur-Studio at Neubabelsberg, where
Siamese fighting fish are brought before the camera during
their fighting and mating season.

First UFATOXE-Educatioxal.

The first UFATOXE-Educational Transparent Creatures
has just been completed at Neubabelsberg. Transparent
Creatures will be first picture of the Ufa-Kultur-Department
to reproduce real sound-film recording. The picture shows a
series of especiallv rare species of deep sea animals and their
living conditions. Most of the material was obtained by the
Ufa-Messina-Expedition. Simultaneously with the screening
of the picture, Prof. Dr. Berndt of Berlin University, a noted
zoologist, delivers a lecture explaining in detail all the minute
activities of these mvsterious creatures on the screen.

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DEATH OF THE ARTIST V. P. VOGEL.

Vladimir Vogel died on the 8th of June. Vogel was a very
brilHant cinema actor.

The beginning of his work dates from the first years of the
development of the Soviet cinema industry. He had not
been a professional actor. In the year 1921 he entered the
State School of Cinematography, and then, with a number
of companions formed a separate group which joined the
Kuleshof company.

By his persistent educational, experimental and methodo-
logical labours, under the guidance of Lev Kuleshof,
Vogel, who was a trained sportsman, soon began to take a
prominent position, and in a number of studies proved his
serious significance as an actor. During the period of
existence of the company and the school, Vogel worked
both as an instructor and as an actor.

Together with the company he embarked on productive
work (in GOSKINO and then in MESCHRABPOM-
FILM, where he worked until the end of his life). Here he
found abundant opportunity for experimenting and for re-
enforcing his skill. He gave great attention to the working-
out of methods. He did not confine himself to acting, but,
taking advantage of specific cinematographic methods,
attained an extraordinary variety and depth of experience.
This variety is not a casual characteristic ; in the course of
his life Vogel consciously traversed definite stages.

From Mr. West and The Death Ray — (a seasonable
tribute to Americanism, where he tried to depict the male-
factor) to Miss Mend — the beginning of the comedian

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tendency, which was subsequently developed almost to a
living buffoonery on the pictures, The Girl with the Box"',
and The House on Truhnaya, and in the direction of satire
in the picture. The Doll with the Millions, In sharp contrast
with these and completely individual was his part in the film,
According to the Law + , which is powerfully dramatic. In
addition to these pictures, Vogel played a responsible part
in a number of productive labours, inventing a special form
for each one. He was photographed in the films : Z-ya
Citizen, The Land in Bondage, What sort of a man are you?
Chess Fever, The Apple, and finally, in Salamander, con-
taining the memorable portrayal of the Fascist forger.

From the moment of his engaging in productive activity,
Vogel worked without interruption on picture after picture
for 7 years, being concerned often in several films simul-
taneously. The excessive strain affected his health. In the
year 1928 he began to suffer from nervous disorders.

He was on the road to a complete recovery when, in a fit
of nervous depression, he committed suicide.

By the death of Vogel, Soviet cinematography has lost
an exceptionally talented worker. His importance as
an . actor was appreciated not only in Russia, but also
throughout the world.

"'^ Known also as Moscow that Laughs and W eeps.
t Known also as Expiation, Siihne, and Dura Lex.

256

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Des rues et des carrefours (Lettre de Paris).
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contemporaines) .
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Sacher Purnal

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P. A.

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Vol. V No. 4 October 1929

AS IS

BY THE EDITOR

Those who have mentioned Blackmail in Close Up have
left much to say about it. We are not burning to make a
written orderhness of its impHcations, but we are interested
to do so, because it is a film of essentially an examinable
nature, and of a nature that, once examined, is far and away
the most significant determinant to unification of sound-
sight deliberately and sustainedly that we have yet had.
Blackmaily I want to establish, is the first sign of a compre-
hension of the relationship of techniques. I have seen most
of the talking films. Without exception any power they
may have had to hold us was fragmentary, accidental — purely
and wholly accidental. Bouldery jumble without inter-
relation or any specific plan, without architecture and without
mortar, the object of which must be considered to be served
if it can get its story told.

Long before the word montage was ever heard, a film had
served its purpose if it adequately illustrated its sub-titles.

257

CLOSE VP

In those days it might have been likened to magazine
illustrations. " Overcome " said the subtitle " with remorse,
Felicitas determines to be revenged upon her betrayer, and
that night . . . In those days Felicitas would then have
been shown on the usual tinted stock creeping exhibitionisti-
cally to the assassination. Mr. Hitchcock, supposing that
such a title were possible in these days, with a more modern
technique would show^ a curtain billowing, fingers running
mediumisticallv dowm the handle of a knife, then cut to Big
Ben, and help his montage with a scream.
There now, wait here.

Montage. Mr. Hitchcock is quite the first to have
realised and profited by the fact that the talkies we all go to
see are using a crassly naive and retrospective manner which
differs from the cinema's genesis only in that spoken dialogue
now illustrates the picture-text instead of pictures illustrating
written text. I think Mr. Hitchcock began to see, and is
probably working it out in his mind now% and will use it well
in his next film, that sound is not an accessory to lollop
clumsily beside a lilm leashed in a twin harness, but a direct
spur and aid to simplification, to economy. Accoustical
montage, in short. Take this instance from Blackmail, it is
a good one. I said Mr. Hitchcock would help his montage
w^ith a scream, which, in fact he did do. You remember
Anny Ondra after the murder pacing the streets. You re-
member her obsession with the flung back, trailing hand of
the murdered artist. At the end of her trudging, when she
must have been, incidentally, very exhausted, the sight of
a sleeping beggar with outflung, trailing hand, brings forth
a scream. There is an immediate cut to the screaming face

258

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of the old woman who finds the artist's murdered body.
This is neat and dramatic. It is important, because it is the
exact use of sound in its right relation. Part of the building.
It is suave and polished, but more important than any of
these, it is intensely significant. I say it is part of building,
and until sound and film are built in one, grafted, and
growing together, not much is going to be done. The
scream that was both the girl's scream and the concierge's
scream banished a lot that we can well do without. Picture
this silent. You could not very well leave Anny Ondra
screaming there. The beggar would or would not wake.
She would hurry on. This w^ould probably have to be shown.
At the point of her hurrying on there could be a cut to the
bed curtain being pulled back and then the old woman's face
screaming. That is to say, that at least there would have
had to be three additional un-dramatic shots needful to
continuity, but causing a sagging of dramatic moment.
Three at least. When you think of films you see, it is
possible the script would have called for the old lady
knocking, entering, pulling up the blind, going over to the
bed, and so forth. Two shots and one sound did all this a
hundred times better. There were the three shocks in sheer
dramatic unity (in its Potamkin sense) piled in one. The
effect could not but have been, as it was, ideal.

The far more obvious, though quaintly touching, bird
song accompanying, in the best Pudovkin mianner, contra-
puntally the dazed, and in the circumstances, excusably
meagre toilet of the heroine, should have its mention, as
should, for just the same reason, the artist's words, I live
right up there at the top " (or words to that effect) at which

259

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we look, as we would, not at his lips, but where he is directing
our attention, namely up the stairs toward the top.

Here, by the way, although I did not like the Seventh
Heaven mounting of the stairs, Hitchcock built very deftly
his atmosphere of chilly squalor. The intentions of each
and their knowledge of the implications had a power that
reminded me of Pabst at his best but in slower tempo. The
way in which slight contacts gave out under pressure of
everything that makes contacts give out when you go to a
new place for the first time, the augmenting distrust, were
dwelt on carefully, with conscious, sustained slowness. The
murder I did not like, but this is not relevant to the point
I am making, that Blackmail appears to me to deserve our
most serious attention, not as a story, not necessarily for its
recording, which, by the way, a British Phototone product,
was excellent, and very free from the bangs, roars and
reverberations that sooner or later we shall have to accustom
ourselves to if we can. Blackmail deserves our attention, as
I have already said, because it has a conscious effort to bring
technical thoughtfulness to bear on its own construction.
The instance I have used of the scream I do suggest should
be thought over as a clue. We just do not want sound as an
accompaniment, and, if I may say so, neither do we want it
solely as a counterpoint. We want it as part of the film,
spliced on to it and inseparable. Not to slow the film, but
to speed it. Let me proffer another hint from the Knife,
knife, knife scene. " Aren't you feeling yourself? " Anny
Ondra's father asks her. A small screaming clang begins,
which gets louder and louder, and bursts like a shell. Mean-
while you are watching Anny Ondra's face, very drawn,

260

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half stupified. Her father says " another customer ". The
clang-scream was the shop bell. Phobia has translated it
thus to her, meaning psycho-analytically that through that
door may come the police. The door bell has become un-
consciously a thing of terror. This again is worth thinking
of. You might call it cinematic sound. It is not sound
only, it gives you a picture of a mental state, as well as having
its rightful place in the narrative.

Both these instances are given as indicative of the way we
must begin to think of sound if we are to do anything with
it. I was touched and amazed to find it thus in a British
film, far and away the best talkie we have seen. I had meant
this to be an article of sound with Blackmail as something
to evolve something else out of. Since I have considered
it more objectively than that, let me add a word of praise
for Joan Barry's ghosting for Miss Ondra's voice. The
overlayer of ^' refainment on Cocknev was superb. Donald
Calthrop's more traditionallv elocutional manner became
good if you decided soon enough that there was a down-and-
out actor, though no indication was given of the fact. The
story condensed to a study in fear was excellent. If you
preferred its more obvious, objective presentation it was a
weak story, full of old cliches. After all, the heightened
conduct and heightened impasse conventionally demanded
of drama are not limitless, and to-day's innovation becomes
to-morrow's cliche, and the day after to-morrow's joke. The
story, however, (and it's after all the crux of every argument
on story value) was not beneath psychology. Everything
was accountable, and it dealt largely with minds. The
established statement that it's not the story but the way you

261

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handle it that matters can be accountable only after you have
established several other conditions. The psychology
possibility is one of the most important of them.

People have not yet begun to speak, far less to think, of
sound in the same wav as thev think now and write in Close
Up and elsewhere of vision. They must. The theory of
sound and sound-vision is just as complicated, and in many
ways similar. Sound must never be thought of alone. It
must now be inseparably and forever sound-sight. The con-
struction of sound-sight aesthetic must be taken in hand. An
illusory amplification of reality is not achieved by adding odd
effects haphazardly whether they be a third dimension,
clairvoyance or every sound that the world contains. The
silent film at its best has already shown that unquestioning-
credence can be tapped. In other words, any medium that
can take you where it wants to and make you credulous is
complete. If you are taken there is no further demand that
can possibly be made of you. The film silent or forever
sounding can be complete or not in the exact degree in which
it is able to render you a participant, non-existant, obliterated
and believing. If sound jangles you into self-consciousness,
into any awareness, it is sound wrongly used, and the film
would be better without it. Consider, after all, sound. \^ery
few of the million noises surrounding us every second of our
lives are received in the portentous, acutely self-aware
manner in which they are thrust upon us in the cinemas.
Sound of motor cars, for example, react differently on
different nervous systems. Here Hitchcock's method of the
bell clang-scream is significant. Sound is more like this.
And sound is not one isolated, reedy noise filling a whole
262

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auditorium. It can only be rendered symbolically always.
The million sounds you hear have a special timbre, rhythm,
sound-sight significance. What a complicated, vast, never-
ending science the investigation and psychology of sound is
going to present to us, and some of us already are beginning
to say that talkies are an art. When you think, nobody has
translated sound, except into music. It has remained an
unclassified, unqualified, imminent and unresolvable sub-
stance over and around us, without symbolic form ; without,
let us say, the fierce lines of sculptured metal that somebody
might submit as a shape for it — without any art form. And
before we can use it as trimming or sewing thread even, we
must set it an area, find terms for it and text books, know
what sound is and what it does and what we do with it. And
that will need a science more than medical , therapeutical,
psycho-analytical, mechanical or philosophic. Till then,
gee, honey, ah'm jes crasy 'bout vu, and I don't mind telling
the world I miss the sound now in a silent film, and you'll
be with me.

Kenneth Macpherson.

263

CLOSE UP

THE INDEPENDENT CINEMA IN

BELGIUM

It seems a little strange that Belgium should not by this
time have developed a local film industry and her own school
of cinematography on a considerable scale. All the necessary
elements are to hand : method and the capacity for team-
work so essential to cinematographic enterprise, intrepidity
in business undertakings and, what is even more important,
those particular characteristics, to be observed in the work of
Feyder of Brussels, which give her artists a peculiar
sensibility to rhythm and to the plastic in people and things.
But historic circumstances we need not here specify in detail
have decided against her and Belgium, where the film
industry is conspicuously prosperous, is still dependent upon
the outside world for the filling of her screens.

And, since she has no organised film production, she has
no studios fitted with first-class appliances, no nucleus of
experienced actors and interpreters. Therefore, the in-
dependent artists who keep going in spite of everything,
carry on their work in the face of the gravest difficulties and
the vanguard of clubs and cinemas are able to show their
films only by dint of constant appeals to foreign companies
and producers and are often defeated by the demands of one
or other of these.

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I propose in this article to deal with two aspects of the
independent cinema in Belgium : production, and the
activities of the specialised cinemas.

First, as to production. Incontestably the leader of the
Belgian school is Charles Dekeukeleire. He is a native of
Brussels, of Flemish descent and about twenty-five years of
age. His artistic education has been achieved haphazard
and he is, as I have often remarked, a lover of plastic form
and particularly of music. His love of music should be
underlined, for it helps us to understand a certain exaggera-
tion in his manner.

His first essay was made in 1927 : Combat de Boxe. It
is difficult to give a just idea of the scenario of this film.
Each detail is important and significant, each image has its
own proper value and its value in the lyrical continuity of
the whole : which is a series of rhythmical impressions,
alternately objective and subjective. Two themes : primarily
the prize-fight in itself, with its sucessive phases and its final
ferocity, incidentally the reactions of the crowd, attentive,
agitated and at last tumultuous.

It is in the subordination of one theme to another that we
must look for justification for the use of crowd-images and
the close ups of the referee in negative. This is a particle
of cinematographic syntax that so far has been very little
employed even by the most adventurous and that certainly
conveys a highly complex impression whose full significance
is to be grasped only by a subtle process of reasoning for
which the generality of spectators have neither inclination
nor ability.

The distinctive quality of Dekeukeleire's work is the

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rhythm informing it from first to last. This, as we know,
has been intelligently, patiently and laboriously worked out.
The result is most striking and we must admit that never,
save perhaps by the conclusion of Pudovkin's Storm Over
Asia, have we been more impressed by the importance of the
part to be played by rhythm than in the showing of Comhat
de Boxe. This rhythm, particularly towards the end of the
film at the moment when the two boxers are exchanging
the blows which will leave one victorious and the other lying
prone and vanquished upon the floor of the ring — blows
whose swift images force us to be aware of their gradual
relaxation — is so significantly and lyrically constructed that
it creates an indefinable anguish, to be dissipated only at
the moment of the appearance upon the screen of a black
fist, the fist of the conqueror, in a final gesture, and the
crowd — now the principal theme and suddenly appearing in
positive — acclaims the victory.

This film has been shown in Paris, at the Ursulines, in
Germany and in Belgium, with a certain measure of success.

After a fruitless effort to produce, in collaboration with
the Vla77ichs-Volks Toonel, an adaptation of a Flemish
legend, U enfant Jesus en Flandre, Dekeukeleire a few weeks
ago completed Impatience. It is a species of cinegraphic
poem and again is primarily an essay in visual rhvthm.
Here, as in the Combat de Boxe, there is a leading theme,
whose exponents " are a road, a motor-car, moving shapes
and a woman. To the central theme, the course of the car,
the secondary themes, the surrounding landscape and
the reactions expressed by the face and hands of the woman,
add little by little their rhythm accelerated by impatience

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until it reaches a sort of frenzy justified only by its visual
value : thus is achieved the triumph of the abstract, and a
fourth theme is introduced by means of the evolution of the
geometric forms which lead the film to the culmination of its
" orchestration

The work, taking forty minutes to project, is rather long.
It is unequal too, and is an example of what a Belgian critic
of high standing, Mr. Paul Werrie, has called " the musical
mishaps of the cinema ". Dekeukeleire is too exclusively
pre-occupied with the visual music of images and leaves their
composition to a too summary inspiration. The result is a
destructive lack of equilibrium between his values. Never-
theless, this second effort of his amply justifies the interest
he has aroused. This young experimenter has given the
sense of speed a fresh expression. To explain my meaning :
when a producer sets out to cinematise speed he has so far,
more or less ably, with a greater or less degree of talent,
established a relationship between movement and immobility,
between for example a car and the road over which it moves,
or has shown us some part of the car that directly expresses
speed, say the wheels, Dekeukeleire disdains all such
methods. He imposes the sensation of speed solely by the
trepidation of cylinders or of the indicator. His end is
attained with force and precision that cannot be imagined
by one who has not been subjected to the suggestion.
Exactly in the originality of his expression of speed by a
motionless object do we sound the incidental possibilities of

the personality of Dekeukeleire the seeker.

* *

In sharp contrast to the producer of Impatience is Gussy

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Lauwson whose talent is much less vigorous and who takes
but little account of rhythm. He, like Dekeukeleire, had
no opportunity before risking the production of his first
effort, of learning how to overcome the difficulties of handling
his material with the help of a first-class scenarist. His
first film, Reflets, is nevertheless interesting. It is domi-
nated by a single idea, Life is nothing but illusion, a dream,
death alone is real, developed thus :

From infancy onwards, man follows a chimera of one
sort or another if only that which is produced by the desire
for greatness. Then comes maturity. The early illusion
vanishes giving place to another which in its turn disappears
and makes way for its successor. Illusions vary according
to age, circumstance character and will. For the weaker
sort there is nothing for it but to create an illusion, unfounded
moreover, by annihilating both senses and will. Others seek
illusion in the imaginative fantasies of cartomancers and
fortune-tellers. For all of us illusion may be generalised
as representing the desire for happiness sought by everyone
according to his particular moral predisposition : love,
wealth, work, oblivion, travel. Illusion is a see-saw that
comes and goes, a whirling roundabout, a pendulum
swinging too and fro, a light that gleams, grows, prevails
and disappears, a poem, a romance ; in reality a lie to be
revealed only by the inevitable presence of death."

Thus, as I have already noted, while it is rhythmic con-
struction that triumphs in the case of Dekeukeleire, for the
producer of Reflets and a young scenarist Carlo Queeckers
who has just given us Kermesse Flamande and is now at
Antwerp finishing VEmigrant, the principal considerations

268

Some of the very lovely Lapthorn posters designed for the Living Corpse,
and recently on view at the Avenue Pavilion.

A British amateur film of distinction. See Comment and Review.
The Gaiety of Nations, produced by J. H. Ahern and G. H. Sewell
of the London A.C.A. Cardboard models were largely employed.

Marv Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in their latest joint venture,
The Taming of the Shrew, — a talkie. We are a little dismayed at
the costume details, but you know what films are . . .

Photos: K. O. Rahmn

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are composition and originality of image. Gussy Lauvvson
appears to ignore cadence in the succession of his scenes.
And even though in a part of his work our attention is
attracted by what appears to be an animating movement, in
reality this movement is not the result of deliberate handling
but is incidental to the given material : the sea, the round-
about. On the other hand his treatment of light and shadow
and his choice of the angle of vision are always remarkable
and there are scenes in Reflets such as that of the young-
woman at her toilet and the waves beating upon the dunes,
whose relief and tonality are really astonishing. For these
we may forgive Gussy Lauwson certain scenes in which he
indulges in the worst kind of symbolism in the manner of
Gance. It is interesting to note that the first two producers
to appear in Belgium are sharply contrasted both in character

and personality and in their views on the art of the cinema.

^ ^ ^

Let us glance at the activities of the independent cinema.
The first serious attempt in the direction of establishing a
centre for the reproduction of classics and the showing of
works by young producers who are also innovators dates
from 1926. This successful effort was inaugurated by my
friend Albert \^alentin, the eminent critic and one of those
who knows the most about the Belgian cinema. For a year
he held the directorship of the Cinema Club which then
passed into my hands. It is a heavy task. So far I have
acquitted myself with an unfailing enthusiasm that will not,
I hope, be vanquished by fresh difficulties. Since last year
the Club has been housed in a small hall, accommodating
about three hundred, in the grandiose Palais des Beaux Arts,

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built by the architect Horta in the centre of Brussels. The
setting is modern and is incontestably the most beautiful in
Europe at the disposal of the independent cinema. Those
who are able to compare it with the French halls, the Vieux
Colomhier, the UrsiiUnes and Studio 2S have expressed to
me their surprise and their admiration. During the latter
part of last winter the evening programmes presented at this
hall were all drawn up in accordance with the ideas of the
Cinema Club. And this propaganda on behalf of good films
will not have failed to bear fruit. The most conclusive
testimony I can give as to the recent work of the Brussels
Cinema Club, whose example has been followed by the
Ostend Cinema Club numbering last year well over six
hundred members, is to enumerate from the lists drawn up
at the time of performance some of the films shown during
a single season. My selection is made at random : Chariot
a la Mer, Rien que les HeureSy by Cavalcanti ; Theatre, by
Dupont ; Puzzle, by Paul Leni ; UExode, by Cooper and
Schoedsack ; Fievre bv Louis Delluc ; Way Down East, by
D. W, Griffith; La Puissance des Tenebres, by Wiene ; Les
Grenoiiilles demandent un Roi, bv Tsarevitch; La Flar)ime,
by Ernest Lubitsch ; Moana, by Flaherty ; La Coquille et le
Clergyman, bv Germaine Dulac ; Maitre Samuel, by
Sjostrom ; L' Opinion Publique, by Charles Chaplin;
Crainquebille, by Feyder ; Raskolnikoff, by Wiene; Les Gens
du Warmland, by Stomberg ; Les Desherites, by Lamprecht ;
Premier Amour, by Joseph de Grasse ; Le Cercle du
Mariage, by E. Lubitsch ; Classe Paresseuse, by Chaplin ;
Hollyujood, by James Cruze ; Le Chat et le Canard, by Paul
Leni ; Le Combat de Boxe, by Charles Dekeukeleire ; Les

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Trois Liimieres, by Fritz Lang; Le Signe de Zorro, bv Fred
Xiblo; Eldorado, by ]^Iarcel THerbier; LichtspieJ, by Walter
Riittmann ; Jass, by James Cruze ; La Quatrieme Alliance
de Dame Marguerite, by John Brunius ; Histoire de Chiens,
by E. Woods; Ait Royaume des Glaciers, by J. Robertson;
La Ruee 'vers VOr, by Chaplin ; Le Fantome du Moulin
Rouge, by Rene Clair; Toison d'Or, by J. K. Howard;
Emak Bakia, by Mslti Rav ; Nathan le Sage, by Manfred Xoa ;
Nanook rEsqtcimau, bv Flaherty; VInhttmaine bv ^larcel
I'Herbier; and Le Diable dans la Ville, by Germaine Dulac.
There were also included a number of pre-war films, amongst
them a fantasy bv G. ^lelies. This comprehensive pro-
gramme is a happy blend of films that have already become
classics and those that are the work of the advance guard.
We were hoping to follow the same plan in the coming winter,
when the appearance of the sound and speech film obliged
us to postpone the drawing up of our programimiC for the
season now at hand. What is to be our ultimate attitude
towards the revolution brought about by the Chanteur de
]az2? Doubtless we shall contrive to do for the sound film
and the speech film what so far we have been doing for its
silent forerunner. But we are assailed by severe technical
and financial difficulties. We must hope that the congress
of the independent cinema at La Sarraz will have helped to
solve them.

Carl Vinxext.

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"GOING TALKIE"

I see that another cinema in Birmingham has just gone
talkie and that one of the big circuits has ordered no less
than forty-five sets oif talkie apparatus. Production of sound
mechanism has been so speeded up according to one
of the experts, that by 1930 it will be possible to have ten
thousand theatres electrically westernised. In Chelsea, the
centre of our sinful cinema, we are not quite so advanced.
Sound and silence are having a fight, for a flag has been
weaving outside one cinema with the words " The Talkies
are Coming " inscribed upon it. But outside the other
cinema are the words : Silence is Golden ", so that the
populace (at the time of writing) is still in a state
of chassis

To my mind, " going talkie " is so disagreeable a busi-
ness that it is a marvel how people can be so blithe about
it. The phrase gone talkie is itself offensive. It
suggests, most aptly, a plague. I met Jones just now.
He's gone talkie, poor chap. No; only a mild attack. But
you never know how these things will develop."

You don't. The hypnotism of the thing is overwhelming,
and it is getting more potent every day. Even the original
Singing Fool, packed with Warner brotherliness, reduced
the 4,000 first nighters at the Brixton Astoria a few weeks

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ago to tears. By now, practically the whole of Brixton
must have gone talkie ". The willingness of Brixton, of
Hammersmith, of Croydon, of London, Greater London,
Middlesex, England, Europe and the world, to be seduced
from its former loyalties is shocking. But not surprising;
for to be uprooted so violently is to be dramatically
entertained.

And I perceive now that I have contracted symptoms of
the same disease, though I am hoping to throw it off, for
in nearly every talkie there are hints of what might be done
if the film producers had a definite talkie sense, which is no
more to be acquired in a few w^eeks than road sense, flying
sense, or a sense of words. The view that the talkies are
here, whatever happens, so what is the use of objecting to
them, may be logical enough, but it can also be applied to
wars, scarlet fever and mosquitoes. This is a strictly trade
or professional view, and if I had a cinema of my ow^n, no
doubt I should employ the same argument. I would embrace
the officials of the great film companies and worship the
sound they fed on.

But unfortunately I do not own a cinema and there is no
reason why I should go talkie in a hurry, especially wath
the large number of excellent silent films mentioned in the
pages of Close Up every month. The exhibitor mind
repeatedly exemplifies on a grand scale the " state of
chassis " into which Chelsea has fallen. It produces a sort
of mob law^ If I " go talkie " it wall be first, because, under
the stress of this jurisdiction, there is no other place
to go to, and secondly, because a time is evidently
approaching (animated by a fear that public opinion will

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change) when the exhibitor will as calmly accept a reduction
of the sound element in his films as he accepted speech,
sound and song in the first instance. And the fact is, that
if one has any respect for sound, it is utterly impossible to
go talkie at once — to pack up all one's views of silence and
hurl them into oblivion. And the more deliberately,
discriminatingly and critically one arrives at an acceptance
of the new position, the more firmly will one be rooted there
at the last, with infinitely more conviction and pleasure.

This talk about the gramophone having reached perfection
and offering a parallel hope for the cinema is enough to
drive a sane man mad. Have you ever heard a gramophone
which could reproduce, for example, Brahm's First
Symphony to perfection? Of course not. It is admirably
recorded, but if you are a real lover of music you go and
hear BrahmiS at the Queen's Hall, returning afterwards for
a colourable imitation on your own gramophone. You are,
as they say, " educated " by the gramophone, but you are
inspired by the orchestra, by Brahms himself ; and whereas
the results of popular education of this kind are disputable,
you cannot quarrel with a mian's inspiration, even if he is
inspired to commit murder like Raskolnikov, or at the
other end of the scale to paint " The Philosopher like
Rembrandt.

I am told by experts that in the course of time artistic
perfection in sound as applied to motion pictures will be
achieved, and that we shall have film music and voices and
orchestras in films which are undistinguishable from their
originals. On that day I will be willingly received into the
new talkie faith, (without renunciation of my " silent "

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beliefs) and indeed, a stage in this initiation was reached
when I heard Miss Fav Compton in Fashions in Love. Her
voice was charmingly that of a human being. We had
passages of dialogue from Mr. ]\Ienjou which almost made
us believe that Mr. Menjou was three dimensional ; and when
he put on his coat we heard the little swirl of noise as his
arms went into the sleeves. It was an extraordinary
pleasure. In Wanted, I remember, there was a further
sequence of audible excitements. The voices of the girls
being chased in the snow by Bill Boyd and the detectives
were astonishingly realistic. They had the effect of planting
us right into the middle of the action and making us feel,
when the accident happened, that we might be drawn
irresistibly by a shout into hauling somebody out of the ice.
Voices heard " off " like this are always more effective than
those which we can follow from the mouth of the speaker,
because there is nothing to interfere with the free play of one's
imagination. However natural it may be, however dramatic
or appealing, the sound from the screen constantly
challenges one's experience of the thing heard. Comparisons
rise up like solid reference points to which the ear can at
once apply its tests, and no doubt much of the pleasure
found in the talkies is due to this universal faculty by which
the least intelligent spectator becomes an experienced critic
of his own entertainment. But in proportion as we are
delighted when a song, an exclamation or a noise, truly
announces itself — in pitch and deliverv the perfect echo of
the original — as much are we offended when it falls short
of perfection. For example, the imitation of trains clanking
and hissing into railway stations, does not seem to me to

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represent the grandeur and fuss with which trains do, in fact,
arrive, and having a great liking for trains and a respect for
their movement, their magnificence, and their noise, I resent
the want of realism in their sound portraiture. Nor have I
heard a door slam or effectively knocked for an answer,
whereas doors and their long faces, the way in which so
much of life is hinged upon them, require to be given full
value, vocal and pictorial, for their part in the drama of
everday life. I cannot go talkie " before a front door
which closes like a piece of cardboard, and gives me no sense
of the castle it defends. No can I be moved, except to
laughter, by the sobs of a heroine who sounds as though she
has been ducked at Margate by a playful holiday-maker
determined to be manly and jolly. One could infinitely
expand the list of sounds, human and abstract, which fail to
reproduce themselves faithfully at points along the film
route. The interest they create is one of simple, gaping
curiosity, in which the audience wonders whether Mr.
Douglas Fairbanks' laugh in sound terms will resemble the
roar of Mr. Fairbanks himself. The snoring of the negro in
Al Jolson's dressing-room in The Singing Fool was clearly
designed to demonstrate that a mechanically perfect snore
was not beyond the resources of Hollywood. The incident
in itself was entirely unrelated to the rest of the action. Are
we to be snored, ducked, hooted (as in The Cocoanuts)
mooed, growled and sneezed into talkie acceptance? Not
unless these sounds are an indispensable element in the
dramatic fabric, and so far this claim has not been justified.
In no case, except possibly in Blackmail, has sound been
economised so as to intensify or proportion out its force, and
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in most of the films I have seen the sound has been poured
into the action until it is bursting with rash eloquence
{Desert Song, Broadway Melody, etc) And what sound!
Who can hear these songs and savage hoots without
squirming ? Well, I cannot, and I do not try, except as a
professional duty. I enjoy Adolphe Menjou, Carol
Lombard, George Bancroft, Donald Calthrop, Cyril
Ritchard, Jameson Thomas, Fay Compton and a few
others. I enjoy the sound of sea-gulls at St. Ives, of running
water, wood-chopping, violins, sentimental songs, and all
the truthful echoes of " recorded " things. But I remain
unmoved at the prospect of 200 or 2,000 cinemas being

wired " for talkies except as it foretells an advance in
talkie technique, which will eventually eliminate its present
faults. Nor shall I become talkie " mad (if such a con-
dition were desirable), until somebody produces a film in
the manner suggested by Pudovkin and his school, where
sound is consigned to its due place in the film structure and
not allowed to dominate, like a toast-master, the whole of
the proceedings. The only other way of becoming talkie
mad is to buy a large block of talkie shares and watch the
little fellows fluctuating on the Stock Exchange. I must
see what can be done, for in one form or another, everybody
seems to be doing it.

Note : Since the above was written I have heard Mr.
MeisePs sychronised rendering of The Crimson Circle.
This places one in great danger of talkie conversion, and I
have instructed my broker to delay his operations on the
share market.

Ernest Betts.

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REASONS OF RHYME

I am writing this time of a term that suddenly came to me.
As things do. On a bus for instance, shaving, talking to
someone about one thing and not really conscious one is
thinking of another. On a bus, rather bored .... wishing
it was over .... since it is made to move, why must it keep
stopping .... and there's not much the end of the journey,
anyway .... that person is an inverted teapot. There !
Suddenly. Someone whom you have known for years is
an inverted teapot. Now^ you know. You have got it.
You can get on. Or you are talking to someone over a
drink .... you find you know at last why you w^ere never
really, satisfied by that author, who is not entering into the
conversation at all

I was showing some people an abstract film. It was a
night on which the projector worked. They hadn't seen
abstract films, and I was trying to explain why it was right
that such and such a set of images should be followed by
another set in just that way. Why it satisfied the eye and
the mind, and why the mind had to be satisfied first. I was
fioundering round w4th words like " important and

design " and " continuity " which meant nothing to them,
and suddenly I hit on it. Visual rhyme. That explained

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it, and we got on. That is why I give it you now (severely
copyrighted, knowing these professionals, who pick your
mind under guise of " getting together "). Visual rhyme.
What would it be?

And then, what happens w^hen an image follows another
one so satisfactorily that you are exalted?

Take any of the films which we say give intelligent
pleasure, although their content is nix. The Spy, Manhattan
Cocktail, The First Kiss ; take the scene in Movietone Follies
I wrote on last month, the singing of " Walkin' With
Susie Things follow things in a w^ay that is immediately
and inexplicably right. We feel it. It's right. Why? I
suggest visual rhyming.

If there isn't any, the film is a broken disjointed affair,
telling a story, and being what all those w-ho don't go to
films often enough to pick up the approach to them, say films
are. So snappy, w^hy is she going into that room now, she
was coming out of it last time, where is this garden, what
is happening, I always say films are so confusing. Now,
Gloria's latest lamentable-film is broken and disjointed.
There is not one scrap of rhyming in the sound or the
pictures. One scene ends, another begins, and they only
end and begin because the story says so. No visual con-
nection, none at all. Gloria hears her ^' protector " is dying.
She calls for her wrap and flies off. We are plunged from
this into a remarkably naive few feet of film showing a car's
bonnet going along a road with attendant noises. Next
scene, Gloria arrived at sick man's house. Have we
experienced any sense of travelling with her? We have not.
And do W'C know what she felt in that car? We do not.

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Whereas if we had seen her leaving all in a state and arriving
even more so, \ve should at least have had dramatic con-
tinuity. If we had seen her flying out of her apartment, and
then rushing upstairs in the other house, we might have had
a visual continuity, had stairs and figure been balanced
rightly and connectedly. But it would have been accidental,
because this film is directed as badly as it is written and
reproduced.

But take The Spy, The scene of the tea party betw^een
the spy-girl and Willy Fritsch. As she moves to offer him
something, he pulls her hands down and as she is drawn to
him, Lang cuts to a shutter coming down over a shop. We
are told that the party has gone on late for tea, and also have
a visual rhyme, w^hich is continued by shot of a boy with an
evening poster, downw^ards as the arm and the shutter;
having been made aware of time and other things, we cut
into the room and see them surprised to hear the evening
papers being called, which we already knew was happening.
The matter is related, and the way the incidents which
express it are shown is made to rhyme visually. It is the
same with a later sequence. After the man has left, the girl,
a devout Russian, goes to a prie-dieu, and her fingers lift a
plaque, which is a bookmark. They mix, I think, into the
same fingers holding the same plaque in a taxi, which is
taking her to a cabaret, where she is to sup with the young
man. Or the young man mav have the plaque, it is nearly
a year since I saw the film. But the main point is that this
taxi, unlike Gloria's, links on the two things. The circle
of the plaque is rhymed with a boxing ring, surrounded by
dancers. We do not see them at first, but the camera retreats

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and we find we are in the cabaret, there are dancers. And
among" the dancers, in the next shot, are the spy-girl and
Fritsch. This is dramatic continuity, but it is exciting
because it is visual rhyming. The way moving things,
w^hich in moving tell the story, fit into each other.

These images are caused by the story. Plaque, taxi,
boxers, dancers are part of the story. So are the things,
they are no more than things in Gloria's film. But in The
Spy they are assembled pleasantly, and so they win. We
are satisfied by their juxtaposition. This is a thing in itself.
It adds its part to the expression, it embellishes and
heightens what would otherwise be plain statement. The
Trespasser is plain, bald statement. And how bald.
Rhyming like this comprehends everything. Angles,
cutting, light, length of shot-distances. And it must be
conceived beforehand. How often you find in cutting a
film that the arrangement you thought w^ould tell your story
right fails because it is visually unpleasing. You muck
around, talking to yourself about flow and diagonal design,
when the term " visual rhyme '' would show you how to
reach what you do not know you want.

Everything in cinema comes back to the eye. You are
appealing to brain through eye. Or if you hold that art is
expression, not communication, you are stating W'hat you
saw through your eye and subsequent reactions. The eye
MUST be considered all the time. Purelv technicallv, it must
be kept ready to see for as long as possible. If vour changes
from long shot to semi-close up, from left to right action,
from dark to light tone-predominance, are awkward, the eve
is prematurely wearied. That is bad manners, and the eye

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retorts by refusing to take in any more. A change from a
scene in which the blacks predominate to one in which the
great mass is white may make all the difference, because it
will make all the difference to your audience feeling tired, to
their feeling that they want to see more, which is dependant
on their being physically able to see more. It is the same
w4th the depth of your scenes. There must be some larger
connection than the dramatic between your close-ups and
your long shots. The enlargement of an object enlarges the
event. The enlarging of events means that they are sur-
rounded with circumstance, are given their place not only in
one scene, not only in one film, but in the life, the world,
which otherwise that film does not express. It means that
a sense of the infinite is reached. But vou cannot swino'
wildly from the infinite to the confined, to the particular, just
because the plot wants a glove emphasised at one point.
You have to know what enlarging that glove will do to the
eye and to the whole film, which is designed for the eye.
You have to know whether it will upset the balance.

Balance is made up of previous and forthcoming depth of
scenes, of change from near to distant shots, of tone values,
and of the manner in which any thing is made to appear on
the screen, from the point of angle or of action. The cause
of action and the angle of entrance. Whether from left to
right, whether moving across, towards or away from. Study
Berlin for an elementary example of this care in this kind
of composition. Since films deal in movement, I should
say it was the angle of entrance and direction of motion
that w^as your first concern. Having settled this, before
you cut of course, you must consider how the light-unity

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will be affected. You will have learnt something of that
from Mr. Potamkin. Then you may have to re-arrange.
Your light may be all uneven and meaningless, though the
rest is right. Then you re-arrange.

A symphony of speeds, of images moving left to right,
followed by circular rotation slowing to right to left, will be
nothing if the blacks and whites that are contained are all
clashing. They need not correspond, anyone can see. You
can have great games with your motion doing one thing,
your tones another. But they must all be in one kind or
another of harmony. I shrink from the word " contra-
puntal in the very act of offering you another catch-phrase !
There must be no breaks, unless you want breaks. Speed
must rhyme with speed and if it does'nt it must switch over
to rhyme with tone. The two can mix, meet, separate. You
see why images which have nothing to do with each other
and are images of totally dissimilar objects can link on in a
film, and perfectly dovetail, and thrill you.

You perceive now why certain Hollywood films are called
pleasant — because they are poems of images meeting in light
and detached, if you have the wit, from the follies of the tale.
Not only objects, symbols, " images " readily grasped, but
a gesture, a smile, a wa}^ of walking, a way of brushing the
hair which shows when the plot makes the head bend down
.... all these are called for, it is true, by the plot, but are
finally nothing to do with it. Those downward-looking
glances of Gary Cooper in The First Kiss and almost half
of good old Gloria in her shorter films. I always think that
she, incidentallv, would make a wonderful theme in an
abstract, with that quite wonderful face not having to do

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any thing but recur. She has a most recurrent face, emitting
man-rays. See what Cavalcanti (who one discovers, still
goes on) can do with the HessHng. . . .

In the film I was showing that night, a train came out of
a tunnel. The camera had been tilted so that the train came
uphill from the bottom right-hand corner towards the left.
Halfway across, cut to a man packing, pulling a suit case
on to a bed. White rails of bed after steel lines in the sun.
Case drawn across, from sunlit window-glow, after train
from dark tunnel. The train had cut when it had been about
to reach the centre of the screen, and the case was drawn
across in immediately-following shot to middle of screen,
meeting one's idea of where the train then was. I said You
see, they rhyme Goethe said music was frozen archi-

tecture. He would have said what I propose to say in his
place, that film is melting architecture. But he would have
had a better word than melting ". Fluid, perhaps. For
film deals with mass, and insists on the innate relationship
of things. The sense of unity, that is, which is clamped
by rhyme. And don't shout ' what about free verse? ' at me,
for rhyme is there too, if less obviously and cheaply.
Ting-ti-ti-ting. We know that though nothing remains
stationary on the screen, nevertheless, the film can attain a
form. Image gives way to image and in the manner of
giving way, builds up the form. We have, through rhythm,
harmony of speeds and through image-in-light, harmony of
tone. These combine to create an architecture which is none
the less architecture for not being only in space, but in time.
We cannot see the component parts all together, we have to
bear the impression of one while a new one takes it place.

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Thus is something built in time. We are able to bear the
impression in proportionate degree to the rhyming of the
parts, the dovetailing of the images. That is the connecting
rod, the stalk to the flower, the axle to the wheels, the cup,
not the cream, to the coft'ee. That is why " visual rhyme
seemed to me to have got somewhere. At the end of a film,
we have a conception of the film as a whole, a piece of
flowing architecture. But the harmony which has gone to
the making of it must be controlled as much by the way the
screen is filled as by the speeds with which" it is filled.
Rhvme is as important as rhythm. That is what I am
saving. I have always been saying that the selection of
images and their order is important. These are your bricks.
Place them. You work in mass. For God's sake, work on
something mass-ive.

Robert Herrixg.

LACHMAN AND OTHERS

Let us now praise famous men. From Adolph Zukor to
Napoleon, and William Fox to Cecil B. De Mille. Having
hitched our wagon to the sublime at the thought of Joe
Schenck let us proceed to carry out the corpse, singing-
together .

Wardour Street is worried. Its oracles are off their lunch.

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On the one hand the public don't want talkies; on the other
they are readv to eat them up. Hollywood reports no more
silent pictures. British studios are as silent as the grave.
The experts predict an immediate boom in British production.
Others say it's dead.

It is. But it won't lie down.

Meanwhile, doubt not that there is a banking account
w^hich shapes our balance sheet, distort it how we will. The
past few weeks have seen the rise and fall of the usual
meteors, have given birth to the usual twaddle. A prominent
critic, according to a gossip writer, has a brother who is a
grocer. Our sympathies are with the grocer. The tvpical
American Girl, via Fox Movietone News, was introduced to
the great cinema public. Our sympathies are with the
Typical American Man. The talkies are still here to stav.
The silent picture is not dead. The third-dimension is upon
us. D. W. Griffiths, in his next picture, aims at a fourth
dimension. ]\Iaurice Elvey no doubt has a fifth in mind.
Colour is about to descend on the screen.

Meanwhile, London is inundated with talkies. One or
two are fair, mnr^ are interesting, still more are appalling,
while yet more are ghastly. The public like a hero with a
cave-man voice. And the best heroines have voices like the
bleating of a distant goat.

Out of the riot of saxophones, triotor horns, fire alarms,
telephones, typewriters, revolver shots, kettle drums, and
mammy songs there emerge three pictures which are
extremelv interesting, three pictures which indicate the trend
of the new entertainment, which, by reason of their very
shortcomings, help the producer in keeping to the right road.

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These are the three : Under the Greenwood Tree, sl British
picture made by Harry Lachman, Gentlemen of the Press,
a Paramount film, and The Cocoanuts, also a Paramount
concoction.

The first is an effort — only an eft^ort mark you — to make
a SOUND FILM. The second is a successful attempt to
reduce a fairly intelligent play to the screen. The third is
an unquestionably successful reproduction of a musical
comedv theme.

Of the three, the Lachman picture is the most likely one
to be questioned. Anyone considering that Cocoamits is
not a satisfactory rendering of the trivialities of musical
comedy should contrast it with such rubbish as The Desert
Song. The alleged newspaper film has no competitor
against which it can be offset.

The merits and demerits of the trio deserve analysis. Let
me say at once that I consider none of them great pictures.
That need hardly be said. But there is in each something
which makes them more interesting than the other growlies,
something upon which producers can work in their march to
sound-cinema.

* * «■

I detest institutions, old and new. Edgar Wallace and
the Pilgrim's Progress, psycho-analysis and Vitamin A,
Charles Dickens and The Daily Mail. In consequence I
know nothing of Thomas Hardy. He is generally con-
sidered by English critics to have been a great wTiter. That
rather handicaps him in my opinion. How^ever, we will
give him the benefit of the doubt.

If Hardy was a great writer, then, he must have had an

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attack of George Meredith when he wrote Under the Green-
wood Tree, The book, when I read it a few w^eeks ago,
struck me as a severe pain. The Evening Standard described
it as a ' lyric masterpiece.'

But as film material it is bluntly impossible. No company
should ever have bought it. Whatever virtues it has are in
its literary treatment. Its story, a silly feuilleton spineless
sort of thing, deals .solely with the romance of a school
teacher and the pretty^ boy who leads the village church
orchestra.

Granting that the story should never have been produced,
Lachman has made an heroic job of it. As was only to be
expected, however, the Elstree cutters have methodically
pulled the picture to pieces. I hesitate to use the word
montage. It is almost an institution these days; but this
picture bore traces of a rhythmic flow, a building up of
sequence, which has previously been gloriously absent from
any British picture. Enter the scissors, snipping and
dancing. Sequences are sliced, cut, chopped, hacked.

The result is JERK. The picture not only loses its
smoothness, but it loses any chance it might have had,
despite its story, of being a good picture in the artistic sense.
It is further handicapped by being jammed up with singing
sequences. It remains as a tribute to Lachman's resource-
fulness that he did give reasons for the singing. He tried
to disguise the fact that he was dragging music in to pad the
footage. But we are too used to the game to be blinded.

Under the Greenwood Tree has perhaps the best direction
yet produced from a British studio. The camera is a camera,
the players are types, and not small part masters. The

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scenes are laved out with an eye to composition. The
pictorial values are sound, if of the picture-postcard type.
This is a candy-box picture. As such it is a sound piece of
work. The sound, too, is used quite neatlv. It is not
dragged in to remind the audience that the orchestra are on
the dole. It helps the so-called storv.

A curious picture. A difficult piece of work to sum up.
It proves, first and foremost, the imbecility of letting one
man make a picture and another cut it. The day will come
w^hen the professional editor is unknown in our studios.
When that happens we may make commercial pictures which
don't insult the intelligence of a whelk. But we shall have
to get some more good directors, first.

Secondly, it proves the fact, w^here the commercial or
propaganda cinema is concerned, that you can't make bricks
without straw. Whoever selected Hardy's book as a film
story ought to be politely pensioned off by some well
organised charity.

Lachman once made a short film called Wine and Water.
A simple, elementary piece of work, it was shown at the Film
Society, where it proved highly popular. It show^ed an eye
for types, real types, a sense of camera, and an ability to
make entertainment without a story but with one solitary
idea. One day British International will give him a story.
He will then produce a picture. Until then he will continue
wasting good touches on silly material.

Under the Greenivood Tree is a picture to be seen. It
teems with faults, but the direction transcends them.

Gentlemen of the Press is as different from the Hardy film
as anv two pictures could be. The one is an attempt to make

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something cinematic out of the sentimental banahties of a
' lyric masterpiece,' the other is a serious effort which seeks
to produce an intelligent stage play as a film.

The commercial talkie, generally, falls into two groups.
The musical and comedy group, and the serious, photo-
graphed stage play. Of the two, the latter is by far the more
dangerous. Few people will have difficulty in seeing
through the screen musical comedy. They are not likelv
to confuse it with cinema. But the screen play, with studied
dialogue, and a real theme, is likely to be mistaken for a
talking film.

Gentlemen of the Press is an example. It has the theme
of the self-sacrificing life of the newspaper man. It weaves
a cynical v.ay through the New York world, reducing it to
terms of front page stories, finding a gossip par in everv
street, showing the eternal dissatisfaction of the newshound,
showing at the same time that curious attraction which
journalism has, the grip by which it keeps its disciples fast.
Sentimentalised for dramatic purposes, it builds a solid stage
story around the paper game, show^s the rise of a night editor,
tells how he quits the racket in order to make more money
as a publicist, only to return to the typewriters in the end.

Its dialogue is sound. It isn't brilliant. One can't expect
the Millennium. But it has brains. Its atmosphere, though
dramatised, is the newspaper atmosphere. A sequence in
which a publicist flings a Press partv is glorious. Only a
Pressman could appreciate its delightful satire. It is
doubtful, indeed, whether the Great British Public will
appreciate the picture. Thev probably won't understand it.
After all, it is difficult to believe that the people who pay

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money to see Broadway Melody could enjoy a plot which
virtually turns on the difference between a good news storv
and a bad.

But it is not cinema. Not in the remotest degree. There
is nothing cinema in it.

Except the words, " It's a Paramount Picture."

People come in front of the camera, mouth their lines,
miake their exits. Stage. From beginning to end. Xot the
silly London West End stage. A little better than that. A
stage which is trying hard to be intelligent.

And therein lies the danger. It is easy enough to ridicule
the Singing Fool, We know exactly where we are when
seeing it. Broadivay presents no difficulties. The Glad Rag
Doll we know to be made of nothing but sawdust. Particu-
larly mentally. There can be no deception there.

But it will be a thousand pities if Gentlemen of the Press
is to be the forerunner of more of its type. We shall have
to become dramatic critics on the spot. Happilv, the danger
is unlikely.

It is much too subtle for the paying public.

Lastly, The Cocoaniits. Here, in my opinion, we have
entertainment par excellence. Xot cinema entertainment,
necessarily, but the sort of entertainment which makes you
see the show twice. If you have the capacity to laugh
Cocoaniits must be practically irresistible. It is more than
funny. It is riotous. The gags follow so quickly that you
miss the second through laughing at the first.

Cocoaniits is the best eft'ort to date to make a screen musical
comedy. Its species is clearly defined and no one is

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expected to call it cinema, despite the fact that Florev's
touch is plainly noticeable here and there.

Most of the future of the talking cinema can be found in
the picture. Its clowning is stage clowning, its patter stage
patter, its production is undisguised Shaftesbury Avenue.
But it gives an intimacy with the players which the stage can
never give. When they can do a show like this in natural
colour, with something which is not a third dimension but
which looks like it, we can begin making pictures to please
ourselves. And then show^ them on the quiet to a steadilv
decreasing patronage.

I wish I could think the reverse. But contact with the

box-office makes pessimists of us all.

* * *

Meanwhile, Wardour Street continues worrying. Its
family life has been tried in the balance and the Sundav
papers and found wanting. Akhough what's a family or
two between friends I The producers, according to the
Press, have not made up their minds as to whether thev
should be gentlemen or merely act like them.

Universal have bought the film rights of All Quiet on the
Western Front. It will probably be dedicated to the United
States Marine, and prove to be All Noisy on the Western
Electric.

Gloria Swanson was mobbed by 5,000 fans at the New
Gallery. I was glad to see it. A relatively unimportant
man named Pudovkin was given quite as much publicity.
The number of tears shed at the Empire during the run of
Madame X would have filled a swimming bath. And then
some. Broadway is packing them in at the Regal. I made

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a joke about the fact that there is only one Broadway^ last
month, unfortunately.

A British masterpiece called High Treason is doing curious
things at the box-office. According to Gaumont publicity,
the scenes at the pay-box reminded the manager of
Metropolis. They may have done. The picture didn't.

John McCormack is reputed to be getting £80,000 for his
Fox talkie. Carl Brisson didn't get that for his performance
in the Elstree masterpiece. The American Prisoner.

The Film Society's coming programme has left the trade
unmoved.

Hugh Castle.

A TRAGEDY

It happened in Regent Street, London, on the morning of
August 27th, 1929. But it had been developing for months.
It developed at the core, from that queer device which hit
London in the projection box more than a year ago. The
device by means of which every silver screen was, in future,
to be heard as well as seen.

For five or six years, the people who really make fortunes
out of films had fought against the idea. Everything had
been running in well defined grooves, but the extra trouble
connected with the new device was seen as a check upon the

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smooth running of the machine and likely to ruin the
financial harvests. To support them in their determination
they even took heed of those who said there was an art in
silence; and immediately made a big' noise about it.

But the folks who made larger fortunes out of watts and
wireless than the film folks had made out of films, saw that
there was a limit to the market even of megohms for the
millions. So, as a cause of progress behind which to throw
their weight, the equipping of cinemas and studios for sound-
films was weighed and found good. There was the
opposition to overcome, of course. But money talks sure
enough. And as the larger sum talks loudest, finally the
films were talking too.

As if darkness had suddenly lifted, the film folks now saw
clearly that they had been quite wrong about the art of
silence. Thev occupied everv available square inch of print
in which to make their confessions by pointing out that the
new idea was a progressive step towards the realisation of
the complete art.

Alone again, the intelligent critics were in despair. For
submerged beneath a flood of new interest they w^ere, after
all their struggles, again without a public. It was difficult
to know what to do. Those who continued to be intelligent
were called reactionary ". And there was a lot to be said
for the argument that it was useless to write intelligently if
the people one wanted to get to merely called one precious "
and took no further heed.

When the three Russian gentlemen who knew a lot about
making silent films, and the mid-European musicians who
had composed a lot of very fine scores for them, issued their

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favourable pronouncements on the sound-tilm, the situation
for the critics was eased. Such voices lent prestige to the
new idea, and enabled one to step back into the arena with
less ill grace. Like straw to the drowning, the now well-
worn " counterpoint " became the new means of support.

But to clutch at an idea and espouse its cause without the
aid of deep rooted conviction leads into difficulty and danger.
Tragedy began to develop. The astute Russian analysis of
the three periods of development — particularly, it seems, the

terrible " second period — was either forgotten or com-
pletelv overlooked. Every moment in a film when what w^as
heard differed from what was seen was a moment of
possibility; and possibilities were diligently sought for in
every commercial release. One after another the critics
began to affect us with their enforced fever and sent us
hopping like carrion to pick morsels from the bodies of other-
wise worthless films. Here a cadenza of street noise tracing
the rhythm of opening and closing doors, there a pattern of
legs developed in counterpoint to a song in jazz. Here,
again, diminutive figures in long-shots and voices faint with
distance ; and there, space . . . movement . . . and the micro-
phone picking up the sound of it all. And this trifling
nonsense was hallowed in the name of sound and visual
imagery.

There was none of the accustomed analysis of whether and
what the film gained from all this trickery. Still less were
there evidences of the intrinsic qualities of the film itself.
Crook plays and cabarets, follies and speakeasies, there was
not a vital idea in any one of them. Where once imagina-
tion had been demanded of the silent film there was ecstasy

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whenever the sound-film triumphed over the shackles of the
microphone and recovered some of the movement and
flexibility of old. In truth, there was a greater richness of
idea and wealth of imaginative meaning in a thug film like
The Racket, than in all of these.

When the word went round that Herr Edmund Meisel,
the mid-European pioneer of counterpoint sound and sight,
had finished synchronising The Crimson Circle, and
that it was soon to be shown in London, one was relieved
to think that the critics were soon to be restored from
a temporary lapse. It was awaited with eager impatience.

At last, on the morning of August 27th, The Crimson
Circle was to be shown at the New Gallerv, to the Trade, the
Press, and members of the Film Societv. Publicitv literature
on the subject explained that each character and each salien:
detail of the film had a musical motif written round it.
Detective Yale, a Yale " motif; the Crimson Circle, a
"Crimson Circle" motif (threatening, haunting): a love
scene between Thalia and Jack, Thalia " and Jack
motifs (contrapuntal) and so on: which would be interwoven
into musical patterns in harmonv with the dramatic conditions
under which thev severallv appeared together on the screen.

In print, it all seemed fraught with imaginative possi-
bilities. The house was filled with guests, including some
whose enthusiasm brought them in off the street without the
formahty of an invitation. All felt mildly excited when the
lights went down.

The film opened with a scene of detective Yale in his study,
seen as if by a dog lying on the hearth-rug. So far no one
has discovered why.

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The Yale " motif is heard, strange, expectant ; rather like
a gramophone running at the wrong speed. Inspector Parr
is announced. Parr " motif, then '* Parr " and Yale'"
motifs interwoven in conversational undertones, but still in the
strange timbre of a gramophone turning too fast. This odd-
ness was persistent. It was disconcerting too. One listened
and forgot to see clearly. Brief moments were reminiscent
of Stravinsky's scorings for the ballet, there were others
operatic in complexity, but still strangelv " sharp In the
theatre and cabaret scenes the gramophone effect w^as most
strongly marked. It was like playing with a split needle.
I was uneasy and felt responsible for it all as when the
soprano " cracks " or an utter stranger rises to make a speech
and collapses in the first sentence. I did my best to cling
to the memory of " Berlin " symphony but was reminded
onlv of Paul Whiteman and Gershwin's " Rhapsody in
Blue".

Neither were the effects " dramatic nor impressive.
When someone is seen typing and tapping noises are heard,
whether it is the typewriter itself or " composed " tappings
that are heard ; substantially, it is hearing what is seen. And
that, I understand, is taboo in the best counterpoint circles.
Even that would not have mattered had the result been
effective.

At another moment Yale leaves Barr and an assistant, and
enters the next room. We hear him fall heavily. Parr
rushes to the locked door and shouts " Yale! ! " Swifter
than an echo a composed " shout follows which sounds like
the intake gasp of an old type motor-horn. This is repeated.
The effect is something like a ' still ' in which the sitter has

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moved. Its objective purpose in the film is bevond
conception.

None the less if, taken as a whole, the manner of the film
had been enriched by its tonal embellishments, one would
treat these details as dull facets of a brilliant gem ; and even
condone the Edgar Wallace quality of the matter on which
the manner had been lavished. But it had not. In fact,
quite an opposite effect had been achieved. The screen had
parted with its hypnotic magic, for attention was divided
between listening' and looking. Where once we rejoiced in
the harmony of silence and shadow, disunity now prevailed.

Hay Chowl.

HEAVY STUFF

From the verv bea'innina" heavv stuff has drawn in-
tellectuals into the cinema to scoff, and they have found it
so amusing that thev have stayed to scoff further. The
spectacle of Jannings, as the cuckold sobbing Janningesquely
in the arms of guiltv Gary Cooper is something for which
everyone is the sadder for having missed.

Memory as a projector in the mind, snaps back to
Waterloo, with the mock-heroics of the general postponing
preparations for a decisive engagement in order " not to

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alarm the ladies and the drummer-boys dying in the arms
of wounded warriors. To recall the menace which the
extras put into the movements of their swords before thev
engaged in battle (fighting Chinese fashion and attempting
to vanquish the enemy by pulling horrid faces) is to re-enjoA'
a hearty laugh. Bliicher had brought the altnost forgotten
art to perfection and could manipulate his eyebrows in the
most incredible undulations.

In the same picture there was a vamp who stole a much
sealed enemy document ; she read it everv alternate second
and occupied the rest of her time in staring into the lens with
half closed eyes.

We are grateful to Henny Porten for romping through a
love scene in Love in a Cowshed with a warehouse, full of
most useful but somewhat shV-makino; domestic utensils, as
background !

To return to Jannings and Gary Cooper ; for, as we are
no respecter of persons, we would like to show what The
Film Arts Guild has done for America, apart from putting
wise-crack titles into Warning Shadows!

Lewis Milestone was lucky to have been instructed in
Swiss local colour by an optimist. All the inhabitants of
his village retain national costume on which everlasting snow
falls softly. (Special effect for the sonorous film ?) Gary
Cooper, as an artist from Vienna, has a fur coat. Esther
Ralston falls for Gary, or the fur coat, but is forced by
relentless parents to marry the Mayor.

Young Gary, faithful to his promise, returns to claim his
bride on the day the picturesque village is celebrating
nuptials for Jannings and Esther. Camera moves down the

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festive table. Male extras are imitating the great tragedian;
wiping beer from moustaches with coat-sleeve, winking eyes
smugly at females. Oh ! Mr. Jannings, that they should
steal your stuff is unprofessional and a dirty trick BUT it
is shattering to see a chorus of Janningses going through a
routine as slickly as the Tiller girls; a sight to be treasured !

Goldylocks, our heroine, changes her wig from plaits to
shingles ; moreover, we can tell that time has elapsed from
the presence of two youngsters who use pea-shooters on papa.
Gary comes back every year, for Esther's birthday party,
specially to draw the inscription on the birthday cake. (We
fear that Mr. Cooper could not have been much of an artist;
we saw his effort in close-up I)

Soft music. Why did you come back? I could not help
myself, something stronger than I, etcetera. You must never
come again. But to-night is still left to us, let us be happy
to-night !

They steal the toboggan from the two children, under the
eternal grown-up pretext of joining in the game. They
crash ! Gary is mortally wounded, Esther is dead.

Of course all the men at the birthday party try to dance
with the girl who brings the news ; Jannings himself cuts a
few capers with her before the cigar falls from his mouth
and the guests leave in silence, with bowed heads. Esther
is laid on her death-bed, the children burst into the room to
wake mother up. Wurlitzers, chocolates stuffed with pink
cream, and handkerchiefs with Ouelques Fleurs,

Dear, dear, dear, all these excitements cannot be good for
such an old man, think, also, of what Jannings went through
in The Street of Sin; Avhen he almost raped a Salvation Army

300

Impatience, a film by the voung
Belgian artist, Charles Dekeukeleire.

Combat de Boxe, by Charles De-
keukeleire. See The Independent
Cinema in Belgium in this issue.

Impatience, by Charles Dekeukeleire.

Tuyksib (Turkcstaji Siberian Railzi'ay), a Russian film directed by
Turin. Below, the Kirghis are admiring the first auto car they
have ever seen.

The Wufku studios at Kiev, recently very greatly enlarged and re-
equipped.

Under the Greenwood Tree, a British International Sound film by
Harry Lachman. See Lachman and Others, by Hugh Castle in this

issue.

The Rails are Sounding, one of the new Sovkino films, the theme of
which is the development of a railway system.

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lass. ^He ahvavs was too slow about this sort of thino- to
make a success of it I)

The plot calls for. further demonstrations. Searching-
through his wife's clothes he discovers a letter from Gary
calling on Esther to break the news to her husband that one
of the boys is illegitimate. Gary, it appears, wanted to take
his own son to Vienna and give him the chance to get a fur
coat I

Imagine how that gives Jannings a fresh start for mouth
and eye acrobatics I Yes, we did not tell you that this
picture is called Betrayal we thought that might spoil vour
surprise !

Off to the hospital where Gary is dying. A nurse makes
no effort to stop the ensuing scene, the excitement of which
precipitates the patient's end. However, she wears a quaint
pointed cap which lends interest to the composition. You
see this is a Jannings picture, an art picture, the sort of thing
The Film Arts Guild has been advocating ; the story may be
a little silly but the ART creeps into the background, into
the angles and all the rest. The Film Arts Guild went to
such a lot of trouble to snap up the story of Joyless Street
because they discovered so much ART in the unusual
settings of w^ar-shattered Vienna !

The reader can guess the rest of the story of Betrayal;
how Jannings nearly hurls a child from the top of a studio
mountain, and how the love of a trusting innocent, etc.

January, 1930, VN-ill see the general release of a Russian
picture, Lvan the Terrible, which contains some high pressure
records ; all forms of torture are photographed richly amidst
beautiful fabrics. The art is in the background, without

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question; and, although the picture is not great, it is
exciting. In spite of the exceptionally heavy sadistic stuff
we were never moved to disrespectful^laughter. There is a
scene when Ivan has blinded a tiresome clown with scalding
soup, and the jester's cap lies, where it has rolled, at the foot
of the throne. Ivan has the idea of humiliating a bovard
by forcing him to don the cap. Had ]\Ir. Milestone
directed the picture it would not have mattered who had been
chosen as the victim of the little prank ; it would have been
vitriolic Ivan whose head the cap fitted.

In other words intellectuals are welcome to their mirth,
we film-lovers are entitled to it ourselves, for it is not the
fault of the cinema that Waterloo, The Street of Sin,
Betrayal, and the rest of the ordinary heavy stuff is such
pleasant material for scoffers.

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

EPOCH

The first tele-talkie has been produced by Capt. Baird.
By fives we went into a little room : were lined up, shortest
in the front, tallest to the rear, and told to stare at a
mahogany box with a screen about as large as a magazine
page. Method was sound on film : matter was assorted
stills of His Majesty, The Prince of Wales, and animated

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pictures of various performers. By craning, a duet could
just squeeze their heads into the frame. Actually the film
was being relayed from another room, but we were told that
fifty miles would present no difficulty, and that the screen
could be enlarged to the size of a door.

Sound and synchronisation pretty nearly technically
perfect ; images quite distinct, and curiously plastic owing
to high chiaroscuro, but yery yellow in tone.

We were, in effect, back in that penny peep show w^iich
Edison tried to endow with phonograph synchronisation.
Prophecy in these circumstances is excusable. Television
itself suggests the time not far distant when the radio
performer will appear — in colour and stereoscopy, no doubt,
unless there is another Flood — on the home screen. That
does not affect the cinema at all, because the essence of the
cinema (or one essence) is that it is made in many different
places and at many different times before being assembled.
A stage play may be televised, but it will not be cinema or
anything like it : it would aim no great blow at the cinema
as an art or an industry. Nor would the contemporaneous
exhibition of a battle in China, or a New York murder trial.

But we must consider next the televising of a full talking-
colour-stereoscopic film made in the normal way in a normal
factory. This does not affect the art of the screen at all :
only the economics. From some central tower a master copy
of the film will be relayed to a big cinema, to a chain of
provincial cinemas, and to a million private hom.es.
Expense of receiving sets will slightly limit the number of
the latter, and desire for company will still bring people to
the public hall. Perhaps the programme will be diversified

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bv televised variety, acted at the same moment : certainly
the theatre will have to give many new attractions to bring
folk from the fireside. The precise effect of this on renters,
showmen and producing companies is, of course, still too
obscure to make prophecy valuable. It is probable, how-
ever, that broadcast film will be national in sentiment. One
sees government monopolies. Who will be the first Minister
for Films ?

R. d'E. BURFORD.

POUR LA DEFENSE DU CINEMA
ARTISTIQUE

R^cemment encore, nous singalions, ici meme, la
necessite d'une entente entre cinephiles et metteurs en scene
independants, pour permettre aux uns comme autres de
sauvegarder Tinteret du film personnel. La constitution de
clubs prives dans bon nombre de villes europeennes 6tait un
premier pas dans cette voie. Le principe d'association
demeure a la base de toute activite fructueuse et Ton a
constate avec satisfaction que de telles initiatives furent
generalement bien accueiilies. Les effectifs de ces groupe-
ments d'amateurs de films de qualite, assez m.inces au debut,
se grossirent bientot de tous les esprits curieux de formules
d'art nouvelies. Ms-is la liaison n'etait pas assuree de facon

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rationnelle entre les divers clubs constitues, entre ces clubs
et les artistes independants du film, aussi. Aux puissantes
organisations des producteurs de films industriels il fallait
opposer un bloc defensif et pour cela rassembler les fovers
6pars du cinema artistique et independant, cr^er une centrale
de location, oil viennent converger les essais isoles des
auteurs de merite. Assurer a la fois une plus grande facility
de composition des programmes des seances de clubs priv6s
et encourager, retribuer meme les efforts des artistes
independants, voil^ ce que permettra une telle organisation.
Est-ii besoin de dire qu'elle etait d'elementaire necessite 1
Sur initiative de ^Ir. Robert Aron, de Du Cinema, un
Congress International Du Cinema Independant sl ete con-
voque a La Sarraz, dans le pittoresque chateau de Madame de
Mandrot, qui siegera du 2 au 7 Septembre. Son but : atteindre
aux objectifs signales ci-dessus. A ce iour, le Congres a de-
ja reuni les delegations de 12 pays differents. Signalons,
au nombre des personnalites eminentes du monde cine-
graphique qui nous occupe : Cavalcanti, Rene Clair,
jNIoussinac, Hans Richter, Ruttmann, Lupu Pick, Eisenstein,
Marinetti, Prampolini et Alberto Sartoris, deja presents.
Une petite Societe des nations, comme on le voit, dont les
decisions seront, aux yeux des cinephiles, pour le moins
aussi importantes que celles prises a Geneve par les
gouvernements. Mais tandis que ces derniers songent a
desarmer sans hate ni conviction, a La Sarraz c'est
d'armement qu'il est question, armement rapide et minutieux,
mobilisation generate de toutes les unites agissantes,
preparation de plans de campagne definis en vue d'assurer
au film artistique sa place au soleil et aux gourmets des salles

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obscures un regal, au moins, par semaine. De toute
Evidence, les pionniers de I'art cinegraphique, reunis dans
I'austere demeure de Madame de Mandrot, ne traiteront pas
a la legere les questions a I'ordre du jour. On y fera de
bon travail, n'en doutons pas, si Ton ne s'abandonne a des
discussions byzantines.

Freddy Cheyalley.

THE INDEPENDENT CINEMA
CONGRESS

An international congress of the independent cinema was
held from the second to the seventh of September at the
chateau of Madame de Mandrot at la Sarraz.

S. M. Eisenstein was present as delegate from Russia.
He came at the last moment (the other two delegates not
having been able to obtain the Swtss visa) accompanied by
his assistant G. Alexandroff and his cameraman E. Tisse.
Alberto Cavalcanti, Leon jNIoussinac, Janine Boussounouse,
J. G. Auriol and Robert Aron (who was president of the
congress) represented France, Walter Ruttmann, Hans
Richter and Bela Balazs came from Germany (Pabst was
prevented from being present) J. Isaacs and Ivor Montagu
from England, Montgomery-Evans from the United States,
F. Rosenfeld from Austria, Prampolini and Sartoris from
Italy, M. Franken from Holland, Moituro Tsu}i:ja and Hi jo

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from Japan, Caballero from Spain, and from Switzerland
Guye, Schmitt, Koliler and ]ilasset.

Tliere were several difficulties at the beginning. The
nature of the independent film (formerh^ avant garde film)
was not understood in the same w^ay by dift^erent members
of the Congress. Thus, for example, Hans Richter w^as
rather perturbed that Pabst had been invited, for, said he,
Pabst made " spielfilms that is films with plot and
action, wdth professional actors. It was clear that Richter
understood that only absolute and abstract films could be
denominated independent films.

It has often enough been pointed out that the absolute film
is definitely a genre of cinema interesting in itself, but at
once an error if it is considered as the only possible mani-
festation of cinema, that is to say as soon as cause and effect
are confused. It seems to me negligible and of secondary
importance whether a film is made with living or inanimate
objects if it has its own integrity.

At last a basis was found. And practical discussion
became possible. The results of this discussion are the
creation of an International League of Independent Cinema
and of a co-operative of production. The League will have
for its principal aim distribution among the already existing
clubs (such as the Film Society or Film Liga) and the creation
of films of note. Naturally the films produced by the co-
operative will be contained in the programmes of these clubs.
The League will also distribute current films w^hich for one
reason or another could not be released in the commercial
theatres, on the condition, of course, that their cinegraphic
value justifies the idea.

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Most important, though not always of the most practical
value, is the contact of various groups all over the world
whose aim is the furtherance of good films.

It was decided also to send a petition to the Institut
International Intellectuel at Rome, asking for favourable
conditions in respect of censorship and quota for films of the
co-operative and those which the League will distribute; a
justifiable demand, since these productions will be confined
to a public already educated and intelligent, and able to
furnish suffcient guarantee of moral responsibility.

The big event was the arrival of S. M. Eisenstein, who
the next day made a little film, in which all members of the
congress played a role, a short comedy which will incidentally
be the first production of the co-operative.

The enthusiasm of Eisenstein was so infectious that all
the serious minded were tempted to forget their dignity and
do as he instructed.

I shall not speak here of Eisenstein himself, who so greatly
changed the aspects of the congress, but I should in any
event like to proclaim my admiration for this splendidly
youthful man who has to his credit Potemkin, Ten Days and
The General Line.

We must now wait for the results of the congress. But
in spite of a vivid scepticism w^hich I maintain always toward
any sort of congress, very little was said (which is well
enough, since it at least prevents the usual hetises) and it is
to be hoped that the goodwill of all these different beings,
who all more or less pursue the same ends, will lance itself
strongly enough to be a real creative force.

Jean Lenauer.

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NEWS OF THE SOVIET CINEMA

The operator, Valenty, has set to work to photograph a
full-length chronicle (news) film, The Country of the Soviets.
The purpose of the film is to reflect the face of the country,
its natural treasures, its achievements since the Revolution
and its current organisation.

For the purpose of the actual photography Valenty will
visit about 80 dift'erent districts in various parts of the
U.S.S.R. At each of the various points where filming will
take place, Valenty will get into close touch with the local
organisations of the Society of Friends of the Soviet Kino.
On the one hand, he will in each town have a technical
cinema consultation w^ith the local organisation of the Society
of Friends of the Soviet Kino ; and, on the other hand, the
Society will give him information regarding the local life
and discuss with him the choice of the material for the
photographs. This work represents an important experi-
ment, which, if it is successful, will be introduced into the

system of Soviet cinema production.

* *

The Soviet of People's Commissars of the R.S.F.S.R.
have accepted a resolution in regard to the supply of
educational films to the masses of the people.

Over the whole territory of the R.S.F.S.R. free hire and
marketing by the producing, government and social organisa-

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tions (trades unions, co-operatives, etc.) — and, in particular,
by the cinema-organisations — are allowed.

By educational films are understood only films of a
political-educational, scientific-educational and of a scholastic
or chronicle (news) character. The purpose of these films
must be to convey to the spectators information regarding
some branch of knowledge of social, political and cultural
life. The hiring and sale of the educational films will he
effected by the corresponding organisations under the
general supervision and control of Sov-Kino.

The so-called CHICHERIX courses of foreign languages
are making an attempt to utilise the kino for the purpose
of teaching foreign languages. In the ARTES cinema the
film Xanook was exhibited, with specially prepared captions
in the English language. The captions are drawn up in
such a way that the spectator — if he had the very slightest
knowledge of the language — could, comparing them with the
pictures shown on the screen, grasp the meaning of the
words.

The text of the captions will also be read aloud by the
teacher conducting the courses, in order that the audience
may master the correct pronunciation.

Exhibitions of this nature will be organised regularly every
week by the director of the courses.

^ * *

VOSTOK-KINO (East-Kino).

In the desert of Karakum in the country of the Turkomans
the Cinematographic Group of the director, Y. Raisman and

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the scenario artist S. Ermolinskv are conducting* at high
speed the photographs of nature for the picture. The Earth
is Athirst, The staging of tliis picture is being effected
in collaboration with Meschrabpom-Film.

The scenario of the film illustrates the problem of transport
in Central Asia. The action takes place in our day. The
services of Turkomans have been enlisted as consultants in
connection with this work.

Another series of private governmental and social exhibi-
tions of the picture Turksib (The Steel Road) has been
arranged. The author and director was V. A. Turin.

The picture was shown to the Pan-Federal Congress of
Soviets, and met there with unanimous approval.

On June 15 of the present year, Vostok=Kino sent
an expedition to the peninsula of Yamal. The route of the
expedition is as follows : Archangel — island of Kolguef —
Nova Zembla — Sharapovy Koshkv on the peninsula of
Yamal — Lake Yarro-Togor — Obdorsk — Tazovaya Guba —
city of Turukhansk — city of Krasnoyarsk. From Archangel
to the peninsula of Yam^al, the expedition proceeds on a
small trading schooner of the polar type. From Yamal to
Obdorsk the journey is across what is in the sum.mer marsh-
land. From Obdorsk to Turukhansk the reindeer transport
of winter will be used. Finally, from Turukhansk to
Krasnoyarsk, reindeer, dogs and horses will be used.

The total length of the journey will be about ten thousand
kilom.etres. It is calculated that the expedition will cover a
period of seven months. The expedition will take photo-

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graphs showing the life of the natives of these extreme
northern regions of the Soviet Federation.

The following will take part in the expedition : director
and operator V. Bluvstein, who had a share in
the photography of the film, The Krassin, and the literary
assistant, N. Shapnov — author of the book, Through the
Ice for Italy.

^ ^ ^

PRODUCTION OF FILMS FOR CHILDREN AND
YOUNG PEOPLE.

At the \^L"FKU film-factory at Odessa, the multiplicator,
T. Weissmann, is working at a children's multiplicational
picture. The Adventures of Boris Malyachiik (scenario by
G. Ivanova). Theme : the adventures of a pioneer,
accidentally finding his way into an aeroplane.

At the Vufku film-factory at Kiev, the director, K.
Bolotof (operator : P. Gorbenko) is organising a childrens'
film The Pest, dealing with the subject of the struggle against
hooliganism in the school. In the picture will be shown
teaching in the school in accordance with the complex method
and an excursion of the pupils.

The director, Shtrizhak, with the operator, Ya. Kulish, is
setting to work on a children's fiJm, The Boy from the Camp
(scenario bv Sharansky) dealing with a Soviet Children's
Colony.

A film Komsomal (" Communist League of Youth ") is
being staged by Ya. Pechorin with the operator, D. Seda.
The photographs will be taken in Kiev and the surrounding

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district. The picture is concerned with the jubilee of the
Communist League of Youth.

A full-length artistic film for young people, The Girl

Student, based on the life of women students, will be stap-ed
by director A. Kapler, in accordance with the scenario of
I. Bakan.

The scenic workshop of the Kiev film-factorv is working
at the artistic scenario for the film Contact, based on the life
of the Communist League of Youth, in accordance with the
theme furnished by \\ Okhramenko. The film presents the
problem of due contact between the old and the young
workers in industry. The story is concerned with the mutual
relations between the young pioneer and the old workman
who does not want to disclose the secrets of his trade.

The mounting of an artistic picture The Fatal Loop, is
being completed; it is the work of the director A. Poregud.
The picture describes the life of Soviet aviators. The
principal parts are played by : V. \^ishnevskaya, S. Magaida,
P. Masokha.

The author-operator, AL Kaufmann, who took the \"ufku
pictures, The Eleventh Year and The Man -o^ith the Movie
Camera and who staged the picture The Creche, is finishing
the mounting of the full-length artistic film Spring, which
will show this season of the year in all its aspects.

In the Sno-icdrifts. Director : Paul Dolina. The picture
will show the Ukraine in the year 1918. On this background
the drama is unfolded of a peasant girl, who is a red partisan.
The chief parts in the picture are played by Z. Kordumova
and S. Svashenko (hero of the films, Zvenigora and Arsenal),

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PICTURES IN PREPARATION BY THE KIEV
VUFKU FACTORY.

Suburban Quarters. Author, M, Bazhan. The foundation
of the film is the struggle with anti-semitism and Hebrew
nationalism in family life. The picture shows the life of a
small town and of the Communist League of Youth.

The Valley of Miracles. Author, A. Ruter. An anti-
religious artistic film concerned with the theme of the

miracle " in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.

The Three Brothers. Author, K. Koshevsky. Cinema
poem about the class-struggle in the Ukraine.

Adventures of a Soviet Khlestakov. Full length comed\'
of adventure. Author, V. Okhremenko.

Breaking Through. Mechanisation and rationalisation of
industry. Full-length film. Author, A. Ruter.

The Secret of Rapit. The positive type of Soviet manager.
Author, M. Maisky.

The Forest Song. A country film. Struggle for collec-
tivisation in the pottery industry at Polls. Author, N.
Yatno.

7^ ^

CONSTRUCTION OF NEW CINEMA THEATRES.

The management of Vufku have decided to construct in
the course of the next two years 15 new cinema theatres,
fitting them up in such a way that it will be possible to use
them for the demonstration of sound films. The possibility

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of introducing sound-films will also be kept in view in con-
nection with the construction of village-clubs.

With this end in view \\ifku is working out some plans for
standard cinema theatres of the town and village type.

The management of Vufku intends to despatch one of its
workers to America for the purpose of studying the problems
of the sound film.

In the course of the present year 5 sound-film apparatuses
will be purchased for the cinema-theatres in the Ukraine.

The director, Dovjenko, author of the films Arsenal and
Zvenigora, is about to stage a film The Earth, with his own
scenario.

* * *

THE STATE CINEMA INDUSTRY IN GEORGIA.

In preparation.

Saba (director Chiarily, operator Polkevich, artist L.
Gudiashvily, scenarist Alkhazishvily and Aravsky). This
picture has been approved by the Soviet of Arts and is being
issued for hire in the cinemas of Tiflis. The theme of the
picture is the decline of a working family as a result of
the drunkenness of the father — a workman. It is based on
the life of the tramway workers in Tiflis ; the local press and
the workers Avho have witnessed it have recognized the
artistic achievements and the social significance of the
picture.

* *

CENTRAL SOVKINO FACTORY.

An expedition has set out from the Sovkino factory, headed
by the director Ivanov Barkov and the operator Giber, to

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Kuban and the Mikhailovskaya desert, with a view to taking-
photographs for the anti-rehgious picture, Juda. This
picture will include photographs of the ancient monasterv
" Rostov Veliky

The director of the Sovkino factory, Poznansky (who acted
as co-director on the film Her Way) has set to work on the
photography for the picture Seedless Enmity, The subject
is the entry of women into the ranks of skilled workers and
the needlessness of competition between men and women
workers in industry.-

^ ^ o

At the Leningrad Sovkino factory experiments have been
carried out with sound photography. Records were made
of a speech, singing and orchestral music. The results
obtained were entirely satisfactory.

At the present time the first speaking film is being
photographed at the Leningrad factory.

=^ ^ ^

VSEVOLOD ^IF.YERHOLD AND MESCHRABPOM-

FILM.

Vsevolod ^Nleyerhold has set to work at the Meschrabpom
factory on the staging of the picture Eugene Bazaroj, based
on Turgenev's novel, Fathers and Children,

The idea of the film is to exhibit Bazarof as the first
Russian materialist.

* * *

V. L Pudovkin, jointly with the scenarist A. Pzheshevsky^

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has finished his director's work on the setting for Life is
Good.

In connection with the fact that this picture will be the
first sound-film produced by Meschrabpom-Film, the
director, L. Obolensky, who belongs to the V. Pudovkin
group, is at the present time making experiments in regard
to the application of the sound-kino to the Vey apparatus
constructed by the engineer, P. Tager.

Meschrabpom-Film is putting into effect the order of the
Government in regard to the free hire of educational films.
During the present year the hiring of educational films will
be considerably extended.

In consideration of the fact that the market for the hire of
educational films has up to now been insufficiently organised
and that its further development depends entirely on the
activities of the clubs and organisations which directly control
the enterprises for the showing of films, Meschrabpom-Film
has forwarded to these organisations a notification that it
is prepared to give the maximum of support to all such
organisations and clubs as are giving their attention to the
hiring of and organisation of the market for cultural fiJms.

^ ^

For the film 2 Buldi 2, the director, Lev Kuleshof is taking-
photographs for Meschrabpom-Film in a special large-
scale circus decor constructed in the courtyard of the factory.

The decor by the artist Ballyuzek reproduces an actual
circus with an arena and large accommodation for spectators
and for the orchestra. Four operators are to take simul-
taneous photographs of the acrobatic numbers, " Trio

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Okeanos the clowning of Williams Truzzi with 20 trained
horses, etc.

At the Pan-Federal Congress of Rabis, V. I. Pudovkin
was elected a member of the Central Committee.

At the first session of the new presidium Pudovkin was
elected chairman of the Central Committee of the Art Soviet
of Sovkino.

* *

ENCOURAGEMENT OF YOUTH.

With a view to closer contact with the State Technical
School of Cinematography and to the utilisation of youthful
talents, Meschrabpom-Film has entrusted the students who
have completed their courses with the staging of a number
of short-length pictures.

P. A.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

A RUSSIAN FILM.

Now that The Waiter's Daughter is to be shown in
England a short note may have topical importance.

War is suggested by photographs, wath one shot of men
in snowed-in trenches.

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Proprietor of the restaurant inspects the shoes of his
waiters to make certain that tiiey have rubber soles, which
will not annoy the clients. Of course THE waiter has
immense holes in his shoes.

All the Wardour Street of Moscow^ dines at this restaurant
if one is to judge by the types. That includes the villain
and the general. And the waiter does all the wrong things,
and looks pathetic because they curse him.

At the end of a banquet he steals some of the fruit for his
daughter, while he maintains his kittenishly pathetic
appearance.

His daughter plays the violin, his wife . . . well, she
married him. Cat plays with a ball of wool ; the news arrives
that the son has been killed in one of the snowed-in trenches.
The son whom we have seen, and cannot worry about as we
fear he may be like his father.

The flavour is that of a Stephen Leacock version of a
Russian novel.

Mother falls in a fit. The waiter drops all the plates.
His wages are stopped. He loses the chance to acquire a
note for 500 roubles. Wife dies. Daughter is expelled from
the Academy of music . . . Even in a Russian filmi this is
full value for one's money.

Mr. Protozanov, who directed, keeps up the misery with
stolen documents, and a would-be raper of the fair daughter.
Spider and the fly. You will know me by the orchid in
my buttonhole, etc. ]\Ialinovskaja is the girl, Tchekhov
the waiter.

O. B.

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A NEW FORCE IN THE BRITISH CINEMA.

There is a difference between a cameraman and a
photographer."

" Criticism is all very well, but one must start sometime
to make films oneself."

Such are the deracinating remarks of Mr. J. Grierson,
who has made the best, and most Russian, British film.

The swash of the sea, and the pulling in of nets; two short
beats, one long. White houses; seamen with white parcels
under their arms; wiiite seagulls; the white light house,
temple of white light ; the high seas and white breakers.

Two miles of nets; the sky darkens.

What adventure in the w^ords " mizzen " and " spanker ",
words from the boys' books of adventure. And one man
keeps watch till dawn. A slimibering boy is roused, in the
most unaffected manner, to take his part in the labour of
pulling in the nets.

Dog-fish and congers, destroyers, move between the
shoals. (Sequence taken in a tank with several exposures.
All the fish pour in one direction except a few, in the last
exposure, and this clever piece of production gives the sensa-
tion of speed.)

Storm. More steam for the straining winch. How
pleased we are for these sailors, so natural in their close
ups, w^hen this monotonous task is over.

If we cannot learn it from Eisenstein, from Mr. Grierson,
let us learn that working men are the best actors.

Visual metaphor, a whale. Heavy, sludgy.

Full speed ahead, through the storm seas to get first
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to the market. Seas crash over the boAvs ; men downstairs
take food, the stoker gives himself a Hght from the burning
coals.

Market. Sea superimposed. Swish. Clang. Bell rung
in foreground. Optically printed mixes. Barrels. Barrels
swinging from crane, and the film cut to the rhythm.

Drifters will make Mr. Grierson's reputation throughout
the world, he needs no puff. We would rather keep our
breath for shouting " Hurrah ".

O. B.

TWO EXHIBITIONS.

At the International Exhibiton of the London Salon of
Photography there is an advertisement for Sunkist, which
shows a hazy liquid matching the crinkles in a beaten tray ;
there is a screen effect with a parrot's shadow : there is a
studv of a receding wave in mournful tones of flat sepia ;
there is a corrugated sunshade with sleek balloons ; there
are black luminous ducks on luminous water ; there is a
design, bv Hiromu Kira, of small black shafts against white
mass ; there are ambery lights in a print of some earthenware
pots ; there are the beaded droppings from a guttering
candle ; but there is nothing to compare with the vital
modernisms in controlled light, which are familiar to every-
one in touch with the art movements.

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That we are not exaggerating can be proved by the fact
that the plates of Cecil Beaton are considered freak
We wonder if the critic, who used this word in a West End
paper, ever heard of Francis Bruguiere, or is acquainted
with the work he did several years ago ?

The omission of several names is perturbing. Surely we
could have been spared the old stuff vrith the nude girl and
the fan, or the little sun of light? And is a portrait really
interesting because a girl holds a tray behind her head ?
And when are we to see the end of the snap-shots of oil,
reflections, speckled black and white halation, deep se;
backgrounds, steps broken off, modern houses looked up at,
scaffolding, squared light behind a sitter's head, heads of
old men with one lamp cast upwards on the sweating brow,
certain aspects of a roof? Is it terribly clever to take a
picture of Elsa Lanchester's arm-pit, or somebody else's feet
in a boat ?

We believe that photography is an art, closely allied lo
cinematography ; but, the light must be controlled. It is
mere journalism to take an arrangement of oil drums on a
wharf, or a pile of herrings. The journalist is not responsible
for the grouping or the lighting. Moreover, the nudes and
curves of cardboard are not the best subjects for the seeker
of better things.

P. Dubreuil's jazz studies should be mentioned but they
are not of importance.

The Annual Exhibition of British Photography is still
more disappointing. A polite Japanese student told us that
he found it a good way to pick up English, consult the
catalogue and look at the photo. There is certainlv no

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attempt to baffle the public. There are countless heads of
•'Bobby", "Joan", and "Carol". There are wishy
moons and smudgy nothings. There are the properties of
threads of garlands, flower bowls and all the rest of the bunk.
]\Iadame Yvonne, however, has a pleasant innovation. She
joins the profile of two sitters in quite an attractive manner.

The advertising work of Howard Coster has vitalitv, and
he makes use of the trick of cutting out his heads and pasting
them on a careful mount.

OSWELL BlAKESTON.

LIGHT AND SHADE.

Ax Abstract Film by Gussy Lauwson

This is one of the many avant garde shorts which Mr.
Stuart Davis is bringing to the Avenue Pavilion.

There are virile groupings of white cubes and cones
rotating in light, there is the sudden movement of a varnished
ball catching a high-light, there are time patterns with
circular objects, and giddy eft'ects with bars and streaks.

It is, in a way, terribly smart, terribly d la mode, yet cute.
I should like to see it again to be able to give fuller details
as it well deserves less cursory attention.

Two stills are in this issue.

O. B.

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THE ^lYSTERY OF THE CASTLE OF DICE

I have a suspicion that the inspiration of ]^lan Rav's new
film is social rather than cinematic.

I have no doubt that the guests of the \^icomte de Xoailles
were entertained by ]^Ian Ray's clever photographs. His
moving shots, inside the house, show us the interior of this
really up-to-date villa far more fully than Vogue has been
able to do.

The Comtesse de ]^Iontgomery, Mile. Orlowska, ^1.
Deshoulieres, and M. ^l. Raval seem to enjoy lying"
on concrete floors and letting bars of shadow cross their faces.
Other celebrities amuse themselves by wearing masks made
from silk stockings.

Of course the cinematic side is not completely forgotten :
I mean Mr. Rav has remembered to insert a piece of negative
and to join in a sequence upside down I

A drive in a car is a little too jerky, or a little too avant-
garde, to be pleasant.

O. B.

BOOK REVIEWS.

Motion Pictures \vith Sound. By James R. Cameron.
(Cameron Publishing Companv. Manhattan Beach,
New York.)

In a foreword William Fox says that Fox Movietone has
graduated from fact to fiction. Oh, yeah ?

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I know of film lovers who are awed, at moments, by the
talkies. They felt quite happy about silent Pudovkins, they
knew how silent films tried to deceive the public, but not,
of course, them : now, when listening to a gentleman say

I can't go on they are troubled with a doubt, a deadly
doubt that they are as much in the dark about this new form
of the art of light as their neighbour. After reading ]Vlr.
Cameron's manual they will be freed from inhibition, in
fact they will feel an itch to run behind the scenes and help
the operator in tim^es of stress.

It is all rather matter of fact, but the four hundred pages
give the reader a real line-up. The history of the talkie
began to be hectic in 1873 when Willoughby Smith demon-
strated, to the world of Science, the properties of selenium ;
which alters its resistance to an electrical circuit as light
fluctuates on it. He exhibited, also, that varying heat in
light rays, falling on such a substance as lamp black, caused
alternate expulsions and absorptions of gas. Professor Bell
stepped into the dim limelight, which haloes the heads of
those in the world of Science, with his " Singing Arc ". It
was Ruhmer who first applied these discoveries to the cinema,
although, as Mr. Herring might say, that sentence has
nothing to do with the rest of the article.

The beginner will be grateful to ^Iv. Cameron for giving
the schoolroom laws of sound, a most forthright section
which follows the history. The difference between longi-
tudinal waves and transverse waves (well, you'd be
surprised) ; telegraphy and telephony ; the common vacuum
tubes ; light sensitive cells, as the photoelectric cell, by
means of which common print can be read to the blind, the

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actinic electric cell, and the photovoltic cell; are all docketed
neatly. Elementary laws of acoustics are sketched in ; for
example : one can learn, or remind oneself, that walls
closer than 50 feet can give no echo, and that l = v/n. I
admit that Mr. Cameron has the honour of being the first
to explain television to me so that I could begin to cultivate
a bored attitude of superiority towards it after reading his
words once only.

A lot of space is devoted to studio technique. At the
Fox joint the inner walls are made of 4-inch solid gypsum
blocks, 1 inch of hair felt, 3 inches of air space, and another
layer of 4-inch gypsum blocks. The outer walls are made
of brick and masonry and are about 24 inches in thickness.
A double ceiling, concrete plaster separated by a 3 inch air
space and 1 inch of hair felt, is supported from roof trusses.
Floors are covered with soft carpets, inner walls are draped
with Celotex, and heavy ^lonk Cloth is hung perpendicularly
to the walls and ceiling so that it can be raised or low-ered
to meet the degree of resonance required. The air is
changed every 8 minutes. Boy, they don't do these little
things by half measures, in other words they look after their

barrels of tar and hope that the pounds but that

sentence ought to have nothing to do with the rest of the
article.

The monitor is the important new technician in the sound
studio.

He looks down on the set, through three thicknesses of
glass, and controls the sounds from a sw^itchboard ; he can
tone down a violin and tone up a drummer w^hen both are
playing in the same orchestra.

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There are special microphones for the women.

]Mr. Cameron passes on to the incandescent lights, com-
menting on the best makes. All that the reader can extract
from this admirable analysis makes the book worth its w^eight
in fan magazines. The problems that faced the engineers
were ignored by the producers; the fact that light reflectors
w^ill reflect sound, and the 6-inch piano convex condensing
lenses, used in front of the bulbs to eliminate ghosts
were not thought of over an afternoon tea.

The cameras had to be brought into line without the
necessity of scrapping the existing equipment. The steel
gears had to be changed for gears of formica. The
drumming noises in the magazines were cut out by holes in
the metal case which interrupted the sound waves. An
endless fabric belt removed the danger of Clicking

Rival methods of reproducing and recording sound are
sifted : the R.C.A. projector, the Vitaphone, the Movietone,
the Cinephone, the Phonofilm, the Simotone, the Bristol-
phone. Some of this was a little too heavy, and I skipped,
yet w^ithout feeling cheated of any of my money. (I borrowed
my copy from a kind colleague !) I picked up from the mass
of information the surety that the ear needs a lot of discipline
to catch up with the eye; and this in spite of the fact that
the eye does not detect contrasts under 2 per cent., and the
photoelectric cell recognises variations of OT per cent.
Therefore, technically, the stock for recording sound has to
be free from the blemishes of the stock used for light
recording. In telephonic terms everything at a level one
TU below' full moderation will be free from distortion, and
the peaks will be substantially perfect.'*

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Still, the ear of the spectator is not ready for the nuances
that the eye will welcome. Sensibly Mr. Cameron does not
waste time with these psychological problems, but gets on
with his job.

Operators will swear by his book, and at a system of
entertainment which demands that they shall regulate tonal
volume of sound reproduction by the number of patrons in
the theatre. The lay mind is struck by the way a sound
film must be rehearsed, if the best results are to be obtained,
by each operator, much as a play must be rehearsed at each
theatre.

Sound tracks on the film are synchronized and the band
can be treated like silent positive, but records would drive
a saint to the depths of a character in one of Warner
Brothers' underworld dramas. Splicing film with sound
track is bad enough, for the join can be heard unless it is
covered with a triangular patch of black lacquer, whose
frequency is below audible range. The screens can no
longer be opaque, the microphones are adjusted behind the
screens, so that the sound will reach all parts of the house,
and the fabric must be porous. Screens in use to-day, with
loose threads forming a fine fuzz, are unsatisfactory because
of their poor power of initial reflection, and because the
interstices collect dust, rendering the fabric unfit for use in
six months.

I hope that I have given some idea of the vast amount of
data in Mr. Cameron's work, which ranges from remarks on
film speed indicators to the information that the central
portion of the positive crater of an arc is the only steady
fragment of the illumination.

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The Patriot. By Alfred Newman, translated by Cyrus
Brooks. Peter Davies. 3 / 6.
For those who like a record of a film in book form as well
as for those who enjoy historical novels, this book will be
an excellent addition to the library shelves. The story is
too familiar to need repetition here, but the volume, uniform
with Carl and Anna, is convenient to handle and eminently
readable. These editions of Peter Davies, Ltd., suggest an
excellent means of permanent reference which might prove
of value in the history of films. We would welcome a
further series devoted to great films which are not necessarily
based upon already existing fiction.

The Romance of the Talkies, By Garry AUighan. (Claude
Stacey, Fleet Street, London).

This is more likely to prove popular thati the opus of Mr.
Cameron ; for one thing it only costs a shilling, and, for
another, it contains anecdotes about penguins w^hich squawk
and a chapter of chat on the stars.

It is odd to see the evolution of talkies explained as the
desire of the showman for novelty, no credit being given
to the growth of an art form. It is, also, strange to find
J\Ir. Allighan discussing British converted sound studios.

What a lot of fighting there is going to be amongst the
inventors. This book mentions names which Mr. Cameron
ignores, those, for example, of Czermac and Blake. And
then the whole matter of speakies was brought to a head b_v
a relative of Professor Bell losing her lar3'nx and the
determination of Mr. Warner to combat the vaudeville
invasion of the cinemas. Mr. Allighan says so.

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There is some new ground. Amateurs are given a section,
and sound on steel is explained. (A ribbon of steel wire is
magnified in fields of different intensity.)

It has been worked out that, in a cheapie words
cost two shillings each, and in 5/zoic' Boat about five pounds
each. Other scraps of useful information, which, in a note,
the author acknowledges that he principally culled from the
Kinematograph Weekly, the Bioscope and other authorita-
tive journals, merit reproduction here.

Every technician, on the floor, wears a permanent
telephone set, which enables him to communicate from one
silent booth to the other, simplv bv plugging in his telephone
to the nearest terminal. Clive Brook says that you can't
float about in speakies, as the rate of turning is twenty-four
to the second. The director must control his artistes by
means of signs, he must place himself in the position of the
conductor of an orchestra. Art directors must think of sets
in terms of perfect tunnels. It is impossible for cast or
director to do creative work on the sound stage, all must
rehearse on a silent stage. As the higher frequencies are
the ones which give brilliance " to music, heavily padded
studios sound " dead The soil on which a studio is to
be built should be considered, clay should be replaced by
a mat of sand. The demands of newspaper men are forcing
the perfection of television. The Bell Laboratories have a
department whose function is to make a study of the human
throat and ear, as these are the organs used in telephony ;
therefore they have a staff' of fifteen of the most famous ear
and throat specialists in America. Sound acoustics can

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be improved in an auditorium by using heavily upholstered
seats.

That is a little peptonised, Air. Allighan. It is well worth
paying a shilling to get more of it. The " dirt " about
Gang War is worth the price of the whole book. " A Maine
exhibitor had to eliminate the word ' Damn ' in his Sunday
showings, because the word was on the film."

OSWELL BlAKESTON.

WHAT A RED HELL.

The British film industry once had ideas. It thought it
could make films. We have just had The Plaything, based
on a play, Lifers Pretty Much the Same. It might be said,
after viewing it, that our films are still pretty much the same.

An now To What Red Hell, perhaps the most perfectly
named picture there has ever been. It started at midnight
recently before an enthusiastic audience, and ended up at
nearl)^ two thirty before a house as limp as the leading-
players. Described as the greatest talking picture ever made,
it was directed b}^ a gentleman named Edwin Greenwood,
who showed no reason why he should ever make another
picture.

Its story concerns an epileptic youth who murders a
prostitute during a seizure, watches another man be sen-
tenced to death for the crime, only to confess and commit

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suicide in time to save the wrongly-accused boy friend. It
could have been made into a fair picture, but for the delightful
way in which the director made all the players go through
their stuff in the best Elephant and Castle manner, flinging
their hands about and shaking their heads as though they
w^ere playing to a couple of love-birds at the back of
the gallery.

But, it has sound technique. Nearly all the long shots
are silent picture material, and the 100 per cent, dramatic
dialogue " consists .of close-up cuttings. The delicious wav
in which a noisy jazz band is synchronised with the inevitable
long-shots, only to be completely cut out from talking close-
ups of people supposed to be sitting on top of the dancers,
is too funny to miss. Mr. Greenwood assured the Press,
incidentally, that his was perhaps the only film for which
the music had been specially written in, line for line, scene
for scene. We can only hope they never let it occur again.

To repeat the dialogue would be asking for trouble. It
has to be heard to be believed. At the end of the picture —
as we thought — the madman's father is acquainted of the fact
that his son has just stolen his pistol and has taken it into
the garden. " You hear that, James?" he repeats to his
brother, he has a revolver." Maybe it was not James.
No one really cared.

Nearly 12,000 feet, and the greatest talking picture ever.

Hugh Castle.

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PHASES OF CINEMA UNITY.

If Mr. Potamkin flatters me by quotation in his third article
on the above subject, why doesn't he do the thing properly
and complete the quotation? In saying that a fly, with
sound apparatus attached would be less of a fly and more of
a nuisance, no doubt I implied that the silent film can be
" nuisance enough." Of course it can. I have seen
hundreds of silent films that were an intolerable nuisance,
either from lacking what they needed or from having what
was needless. To my illustration of the fly I added : The
fact is, a fly knows its own business and keeps its movements
quiet, and in its own way it is the most perfect thing that
ever existed." Film or fly should contain neither more nor
less than its function demands.

Mr. Potamkin says that by attacking the " stupid uses
of the sound film to date and the unjustifiable suppression
of the silent film," I am condemning the compound film.
What I am really condemning is the stupid and the unjusti-
fiable. But Mr. Potamkin and I are really out for the same
things, and I therefore grant him absolution.

Ernest Betts.

HOLLYWOOD NOTES.

An overhead railway for the transporting of stage sets
has been completed at the Lasky-Paramount studios. It
has a total length of two miles. By its use large sections

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of sets are easily and quickly carried from the carpenter
shop to the various stages. Heretofore this work has

required large corps of men and huge trucks.

^ ^ ^

Al Jolson's current vitaphone film, Say it ic'lth Songs, is
to be followed by Mammy, a singing picture which is now
in production at Warner Brothers' studio. Both the story
and the music are by Irving Berlin, the popular American
song writer.

* * *

Universal Company have recently announced the winners
in their $2000 prize contest for the best letters in answer to
the question, Why do alluring women love homely men ? "
This is illustrative of the methods employed by Universal in
furtherance of their policy to maintain as close a personal
relationship as possible with their film patrons. Each week
their national advertisement, in the form of a personal letter
from the president, Carl Laemmle, invites comments and
suggestions from the public, while at intervals during the
vear cash prizes are offered for picture titles or for answers

to questions such as the one above quoted.

^ ^

Romance of the Rio Grande, a Fox movietone, has been
especiallv adapted for Warner Baxter from Katherine
Gerould's novel, " Conquistador." Baxter's charming
portrayal of the gracious ^Mexican bandit in Fox's first out-
door talking picture, In Old Arizona, brought a widespread
demand for his further appearance in that type of picture.
The locale of the Romance of the Rio Grande is in nothern
]\Iexico, and the exterior scenes are being taken on the spots

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actually called for in the story. A cattle round-up is one
of the spectacular features of the picture — a ranch containing
forty-five thousand head of cattle having been leased for
this purpose by the Fox company. Al Santell is directing
the production.

* * *

The English celebration of Primrose Day, April 19th, in

commemoration of the day of Disraeli's death, has been

recorded on a special Vitaphone reel and will be shown in

connection with George Arliss' film version of Disraeli,

recently completed at Warner Brothers' studio.

^ ^ ^

Greta Garbo's forthcoming M-G-M picture is from a story
written especially for her by her present director, Jacques
Feyder. Like her current production. The Single Standard,
it will be a silent film. Her first talkie, Anna Christie, will
follow next.

Animated cartoons have now been taught to speak and
sing. By using what is known as the Cherniavsky system,
developed at the Universal studio, the artist of these
animated drawings is able to match them perfectly with
sound effects.

* * *

Paramount-Lasky sound experts have perfected an
explosion-proof " microphone, which is being used for the

first time in George Bancroft's new picture, The Mighty.

Normal microphones and sound tubes are shattered by the

explosive vibrations produced by gun fire.

* * *

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An Arabian orchestra of five natives, imported directly
from Morocco, will be seen and heard in the forthcoming
M-G-M screen version of Major Zenovi Peckoff's novel of
the Foreign Legion, The Bugle Calls, directed by George
Hill.

* * *

The Jade Box, the first talking-picture serial, is in
production at Universal. It will consist of ten weekly

episodes, of two reels each.

* * *

Golden Dawn, the Hammerstein operetta, is being prepared
for the screen by Warner Brothers. A section of the Los
Angeles river and its environs will serve as the African locale
of the libretto. Alice Gentle and Walter Wolf have the
leading roles, supported by several other equally well known
operatic singers. A chorus of two hundred negroes will

constitute a unique and impressive feature of the film.

* * *

The Fox Company's recently announced policv of
discontinuing the making of silent films has been amended.
The inability of thousands of exhibitors throughout the
country to secure sound equipment for their theatres has
induced the company to resume the making of silent versions
of their movietone productions. And this they will continue
to do until at least seventy-five per cent, of the theatres are
equipped to show^ audible films. At present not more than
twenty-five per cent., or a little over five thousand, are thus
equipped. ^ ^ ^

At the present writing the title of Norma Talmadge'^
forthcoming first talkie is New York Nights. It was

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originally Tin Pan Alley. Not the least of Hollywood's
problems is the selecting of picture titles. Experience has
taught the film producer that Shakespeare's airy opinion of
the value of a name has no place in the picture show
business.

* * *

Not to be outdone by the Warner Brothers in their all-
star Show of Shows, Paramount Lasky are preparing a like
stellar production, headed by Elsie Janis. The title and the
theme of the picture have not yet been announced. So far
the studio managers have contented themselves with the
impressive announcement that the production will not only
include every star and feature player under the Lasky
banner, but will also call for the co-operation of all the
directors, all of the writers and all of the technical experts
of the organization.

* * *

La Marseillaise is the title of a " super-production " under
way at the Universal studio. The story deals with the life
of Rouget de Lille, the composer of the French national
anthem, and the circumstances surrounding the birth of
the song. The music for the picture has been written by
Charles Wakefield Cadman, one of America's foremost

composers. Paul Fejos is directing the picture.

* * *

The actors' strike, ordered by the Actors' Equity
Association has been called off. Disaffection among the
ranks of the association itself and the uncompromising stand
on the part of the producers are responsible for the defeat
of this attempt to unionize the picture industry. While the

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strike caused some inconvenience to the producers, it at no
time seriously interfered with the casting of their pictures

or the maintainance of their production schedules.

^ ^

United Artists studios announce that D. W. Griffith is
planning to film a life of Abraham Lincoln. Griffith him-
self, in commenting upon the project, says, I regard the
opportunity of bringing the story of the real Lincoln to the
talking screen as a sacred trust, and if I am in any way
successful in doing justice to the character of the greatest
man in American history, I shall have accomplished the

greatest ambition of my life."

*• * *

Tiger Rose, a forthcoming Warner Brothers* picture,
contains a novelty in the form of a completely dark scene
— the interior of an unlighted room. No camera was used.
The scene was shot vrholly with microphones and
consists only of the voices of two men talking in an unseen
adjoining room.

C. H.

A new creative group has been formed in New York, called
Excentric Films, which devotes itself solely to the experi-
mental in Film Art and plans to release its films through
the little film art theatres in America and in Europe.

The initial production now under way, is a two reel satire,

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What's Wrong Now? (tentative title), from a story by Lajos
N. Egri, Hungarian playwright whose expressionistic drama,
Rapid Transit was produced in New York by the Province-
town Players. The film has been adapted for the screen
by Herman G. Weinberg who is also assisting in the
capacity of assistant director and who was heretofore con-
nected with various little " art " theatres in New York, The
Fifth Avenue Playhouse, The Carnegie Playhouse, etc.

Direction and sets are by Robert van Rosen (formerly
scene designer for Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Theatre, the
Provincetown Playhouse and others). The settings will be
in the expressionistic vein, there are to be no titles and several
new photographic (or rather, cinematographic) innovations
are promised.

The story is a satire on feminine idolatry in America and
judicial methods there and will be projected through the
medium of grotesque fantasy and stylized acting — much of
the " slip action " hearkening back to Freud's notebooks,
since it is of course, impossible, because of stringent moral
censorship in New York, to achieve complete realism
where the story's exigencies demand it.

A set of ^''stills" will be forwarded CLOSE-UP for
exclusive release on the Continent as soon as they are
available.

Simultaneously, another film, a one-reel study of New
York, styled, Cosviopolis, by Herman G. Weinberg is also
being made and will be released at the same time. Stills
from this film will also be sent to CLOSE-UP.

Excentric Films marks the first avant-garde production
unit in America.

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LUCKY STAR.

A New Borzage Gayxor-Farrel Slapstick.

Perhaps the funniest film of the year. Charles does not
point the waif's wee nose to the stars, but washes her " inside
and out ". But you have to hear the Gaynor say it to get
the chuckle. Photography rotten. You know those studio
exteriors, country lanes and such. When anybody moves
a million half shadows, spread like a starfish, follow the
movement shamelessly, but don't suggest a million suns
shine on these quiet countrysides. Ophthalmic goitre would
do as much if you wanted to see things that way.

THE CRIMSON CIRCLE.

British Internationalizing Edgar "Wallace.
Musical Effects by Edmund ]\Ieisel.

Somebody once spoke of noises " Meiseling " themselves
into the subconscious. We lauded this happy discoverv in
happier memory of Potemkin, Berlin, Hoppla, Ten Days.
The man, then, who had given us " effects " for the world's
best films was now to give them for the worst. Or, be kind,
and say near-worst.

The programme told us a lot about a method that cannot
have existed, and if it had, would have given only one kind

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of effect — one of permanent yawning. The programme told
us, for instance, that every character had a distinctive motif,
was also given a musical rendering by means of appropriate
instrumentation. (This blah rang no new bell. Shige
Sudzuki had once told us much more clarid ideas concerning
character instrumentation on a small railway platform
near the German Staaken studios). Example of appropriate
instrumentation : man talking angrily (boombedeboom) —
woman speaking anxiously (peckpeckpeck). Wurlitzers had
done it for Felix.

" The music for each scene composed to convey its
atmosphere ; each picture on the screen has sound in rhythm
— expressing the ' soul ' of every situation."

The soul of every Edgar Wallace situation !

It was not as bad as that. We should remember how
Mara comes into a room and sits down to read a letter, all
to the tune of a highly rhythmetised tango. That w^as worth
a lot when you consider ]\Iara — which Meis.el helps you to
do — in this light. He Meisels her into your subconscious.
Nothing else could. Remember too the typewriter's cute
tappetvtap, and specially a harpsichordish con brio tinkling
round the somberer noises of a business interview.

Why do we put a man like Meisel on to a man like (with
respects due) Edgar Wallace? Left to ourselves we would
certainly accompany Potemkin with Moonbeams in a Chinese
Temple Garden. Still, there it is. Tremolo luv motif and
all. With fugitive, sly moments of the Meisel we know
and care about.

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FOUR FEATHERS.

Tense, sporting mothers brought their bowler-hatted off-
spring. Remembah, this is England's glory. Cooper and
Schoedsack in a flurry of splenetic National Anthematising.
The animals were nice. Their animals could not be other-
wise. But the rest was not really very funny, though the
bowser hats rose like brodericks on bayonets in a military
three cheers. It was preceded by the world's wittiest film. A
synchronised cartoon entitled When the Cat's Away, We'll
say no more as Mr. Herring has promised to write on it next
month. But, in the meantime, see it if you can.

It is interesting, in spite of the bowler hats of Young
England, to take a look at the recently published Educational
Survey, from the Secretariat of the League of Nations.
This contains the interesting result of an enquiry conducted
by Mrs. C. N. Wilson into the child's reaction to war films.
This enquiry was set in the form of a questionnaire, which
asked : —

1. What War films have you seen?

2. Write down the name of one of these films.

(a) How long ago did you see it?

(b) What do you remember best?

(d) What do you think of the other side ?

(e) What did the film make you think of war?

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This questionnaire was submitted to 4,022 children from 76
schools in Bradford, and to 4,000 children from schools in
Kent, Lincolnshire and Oxford, and in ever}' case teachers
were asked to do nothing to prejudice the replies one way or
the other.

The repHes revealed an overwhelming anti-war majority.
95 per cent, of all the cases examined were anti-war. The
remaining 5 per cent, were in varying degrees pro-war.
From these established facts it is evident enough that war
films such as we have seen give to the child mind an
impression of distaste and horror.

We thank Herrn Wolfgang Ertel-Breithaupt and Herrn
Hans Walter Kesselmaier, editors of Filmkiinstler und
Filmkunsty for sending us some copies of their interesting
German magazine. (Verlag : Berlin W 30, Rosenheimer-
strasse 13). It calls itself a contribution to the history of
contemporary films and talkies. We like the fresh and
courageous criticism of this paper which does not shrink from
honest judgment. Criticism of film production in general,
of films, of certain societies and individuals.

There is an article about film-morality that holds the
attention. Question of Censorship again, but this time
stated from another point of view looked at as the shadow of
film morality : there is a lack of responsible men in
the broader circles of film industry, speculation instead of
creation, business instead of art.

343

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It is a good sign, that the recognition of the bad quality
of the average him becomes more and more popular ; that
an increasing number of people rebel against it. And I
hope, too, that there will be a day when a huge majority of
good and moral films will make censorship an entirely
superfluous institution — instead of its being a hindrance to
the few good films that exist to-day.

A good cultural review " of the talkies endeavours to
explain the exceedingly involved state of the matter and to
keep us up to date with regard to the latest German and
international productions.

Not only film-art but also film-artists are in the scope of
this nicely illustrated magazine and we find a lot of photos,
drawings, and articles on the leading actors, directors, critics
and cameramen.

So that everyone who likes the cinema will find many
rewarding features in this monthly review.

Trude Weiss.

]\Iary Fields, director of non-fiction subjects for British
Instructional Films, is completing Deferred Payment, a
drama, for The British Social Hygiene Association. The
story is of a purser who, on becoming engaged to a girl,
reads a leaflet which sends him to a herbalist. He spends a
lot of money, and thinks he is cured. At first all is well,
but, after the baby, the girl develops his disease, and the
second baby is blind. The film has been made with all the
technique and polish of an ordinary production, and Miss

344

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Fields believes that it is unique among British or American
propaganda films in that there is no villain, and that the
' message ' is not defeated by over emphasis. The ' other
side ' is not made a martyr of, and the foolish young man is
a very charming personality.

The difficulty in making English propaganda films is (a)
small allocation of money — the Government allows about a
third per reel of the amount allowed in Germany, and (b)
the refusal of most public and private societies to allow an
interesting story, or a subtle means of approach.

The Secrets of Xatiire Films, for which ]\Iiss Fields is
responsible, are to be synchronised. It will be possible to
listen to the bean as it runs, and the process will be explained
by voice instead of by sub-titles.

R. d'E. B.

The World League for Sexual Reform arranged a showing
of the early Russian film Abortion. It is difficult to comment
on it from a cinematographic point of view. It was not, as
Avas announced, the Russian version but a censored German
copy, so scratched that it was sometimes difficult to dis-
tinguish the images. The projector and the film broke
constantly. It would have seemed worth while to hire a
portable projector for the evening.

To the intelligent individual it is difficult to understand
why the film should not have been shown to family audiences
at the Polytechnic. It had much in common with the Little
A^ictorian moral stories nurses used to read to children on

CLOSE UP

Sunday afternoons, broken by somewhat alarming diagrams
in what seemed to be a quite irrational manner.

It was convincing proof however that science and entertain-
ment value have nothing in common, and as compared with
Mechanics of the Brain or Bed and Sofa, this film must be
regarded as a failure, at least in the form in which it was
presented the other night. We are also becoming convinced
that the specialized presentation of such films to small
audiences serves little purpose. They were made for the
young and the workers and where neither are represented in
the audience there is only the impression that a great deal
of fuss has been made about a point which intelligent people
accept without question. A purely scientific film which
offered fresh data of medical value would be valuable and of
great interest ; to show a censored story and a few diagrams
merely builds mystery round a straightforward situation.

AN AMATEUR FILM OF DISTINCTION.

The Gaiety of Nations, stills of which are included in this
issue, is a remarkably good essay in creative imagination
produced by two members of the London A.C.A., Mr. J.
H. Ahern and Mr. G. H. Sewell. The entire film, 350 feet
in length, was made, with the exception of one or two shots,
in a room 15 feet by 11 feet, and models were mainly
employed.

The life of a city — an)^ city — in Europe is suggested —

346

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cafes, streets, skyscrapers, newsboys, electric signs, traffic.
A politician is assassinated, war is declared, the people are
whipped up into a fever of patriotism, panic breaks out on
the Stock Exchange. Then, the scenes of war — battlefields
— tanks going into action — explosions — men dying in agony,
followed by graveyards — the financial chaos — the triumph
of the American dollar.

The models used (mostly cardboard) were simple but
extraordinarily effective, as also were the close-ups and
silhouettes of human beings in a number of scenes. Realistic
shots of battlefield explosions were achieved by the use of
tin reflectors.

For the success of a film of this character nearly every-
thing depends on the lighting and the cutting, and both are
excellent. Yet the producers worked throughout with only
tv;o " Kodalites " ! The cutting based on the Russian
method, was very good. Some shots were reduced to a
matter of frames.

Produced on 16 mmi. stock, Gaiety of Nations sets a
standard which every amateur should study closely. Some
amateurs seem to aim at imitating the large scale productions
of the professional studios. Such methods are almost bound
to result in failure, for obvious reasons. The function of
amateur cinematography should be to create, and not to
imitate, to bring somiething new to the Cinemia, and not to
copy old methods. ^lessrs. Ahern and Sewell have shewn
what can be done, and hovr it can be done, and the example
they have set should result in nothing but good for the
amateur film movem.ent in Britain.

A. W.

Impressed by The Mercury Press Ltd., London, Ileord and Ckelmsford.

The Avenue Pavilion

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Buses to the Door : — Xos. la, ic, 14. 14a, igc, igd, 22, 24, 29, 29a, 29b, 29c, 38, 39, 48, 129, 138.

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PARIS EXPRESS, By DUHAMEL.

I DO LOVE TO BE BESIDE THE SEA SIDE, By 0.

BLAKESTON.
BITHULITE, By P. SICHEL.
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PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE, By A. STRASSER.
LA MARCHE DES MACHINES— LES NUITS ELECTRIQUES-

PARNASSE, By EUGENE DESLAW.
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ALLEGRET.

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REFERENCE BOOKS FOR THE FUTURE

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Dative to the = dem (dames)

Accusative the = den (deign)

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pubHc how a screen play is made." — New Age.

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Vol. V No. 5 November 1929

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(For all business matters in England)

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VARIETES"

Revue Mensuelle Illustree de L'esprit Contemporain
Directeur : P. G. van Hecke
D E U X I E M E A N N E E

(A PARTIR DU 15 MAI 1929)

Dans chaque niimero :
75 reproductions — nombreux dessins — 56 a 64 pages de texte.

des contes, des essais,des poemes, des reportages, des notes critiques et d'actualite sur la litt^rature,
les arts plastiques, le cinema, le theatre, la mode, la musique, la curiosite, etc., par des coUabora-

teurs de premier ordre.

LES CHRONIQUES ET RUBRIQUES :

Pierre MacOrlan
Henri Vandeputte
Paul Fierens
Denis Marion .
Pierre Courthion

Andre Delons .
Franz Hellens

Nico Rost
Audre de Ridder
P.-G. van Hecke
Gille Anthelme
Bernard Brunius

Albert Valentin

Sacher Purnal

Tragedies et divertissements populaires.
Habitudes preferees.

Des rues et des carrefours (Lettre de Paris).
Le sentiment critique.

La boite a surprise (tableau des moeurs artistiques

contemporaines) .
Le cinema a Paris.
Chronique des disques.

Chroniques de Berlin
L'anthologie esthetique.
La peinture.
Les sports.

Inventeurs et Inventions.

Le coeur a I'ouvrage.

UN ROMAN DE :
" GoUigwog."

LA PIECE INEDITE DE :

FERN AND CROMMELYNCK

" TRIPES D'OR.'

Des lettres inectites de Paul Leautaud a Paul Valery, Rachilde, Remiy de Gourmont, Marie Laurencin,
Marcel Schwab, Valette, Audre Rouveyre, Appolinaire, etc., etc.

VARIETES " publishes every month a number of reproductions
from exclusive stills of classic and av ant garde films, with criticisms
by Albert Valentin, Denis Marion and Andre Delons.

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Editor : K. Macpherson
Assistant Editor : Bryher
Published by POOL
Riant Chateau • Territet • Switzerland
London Office : 24 Devonshire St., W.C.i

Contents

As is

Mechanisms of Cinema (contd.)
SuPeRpRoDuCeR
Stump of an Empire
Over the ]Moon .
Kino and Lichtspiel
Freud on the Films
^Making a Fihn of the Actual .
Loss and Profit ♦
Finds

This Montage Business
Voir et Entendre .
Comment and Review

Kenneth Macpherson
L. Saalschutz
Michael Stuart
P. Attasheva
Robert Herring
h. a. potamkin

OSWELL BlAKESTON

John Grierson
Clifford Howard
D. L. H.
R. Bond

Freddy Chevalley

Paris Correspondents :

London Correspondent :
HoUywocd Correspondent
Nezv York Correspciident
Berlin Correspondent :
Ge?ieva Correspondent :
Moscozc Correspondent :

/Mark Allegret
IJeax Lexauer

Robert Herring
; Clifford Howard
; h. a. potamkix

A. Kraszxa-Krausz

F. Chevalley

P. Attasheva

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Vol. V No. 5 November 1929

AS IS

BY THE EDITOR

German films (Export brand) used to flutter something in
the hearts of those who once had vaguely heard that films
were art. The flutter persisted long after Germans them-
selves had seen the decapitated head of their industry whisked
off by that Salome (surnamed Hollywood) who upset all
conventions, party politics and first tentatives of international
concord, by singing for her somewhat gruesome supper like
a chirpy, rather undersized and rather ratty schoolgirl. As
is usual in cases of insuft'erable precocity, people said : Oh,
the little one, Oh, the paragon ! " — and came to adore.

So the Germans said : ^' We too shall have a Little One."

And they did.

And his name was Connie-Bov.

Now, I don't think you would ever believe that the theme
of a shipload of virgins sailing expectantly to Australia in
the 'nineties to be married off by ballot to a pack of males

349

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they have never seen in that Land Without Ladies*, could
be anything but farce.

It couldn't. But, for some strange reason, not one of
them saw it.

So here we are. How rude and rough and He-Man the
beginning ! Here in the Land Without Ladies, men are
MEN — meaning ferocious nit-wits as usual. To prove it
you have to see them enjoying a lynching, all the licking of
lips, and all that, in front of a camera that meanders round
like a lop-sided and inquisitive old goat.

Contrast Avith this the tender picture of the cattle-ship —
excuse me — the big boat with the ladies, sighingly singing
Manchester Spirituals and dreaming, each and every, with
her newspaper interview in her hand.

One interview says under the picture, " I want gold
Another wants children, and a third will keep her man
happy. You are shown the lady in order to marvel at
humanity's blind faith. She has the spiritual conception of
companionate marriage, and some poor devil has to have her.
But hush ! This is our heroine we are thoughtlessly
criticising. Covered with blushes, let us return to our camp.

These boys, now aren't they just too happy waiting for
the good times coming? Hear us out in front of the screen
guffawing awa}^ as we always will, at the barely low-brow,
indeed quite browless antics of the fat man scenting woman !
And the great big camera keeps turning !

But, look you here, the fat is in the ruddy fire ! (We are
being He-Man, aren't we?) There's a dame too few!
Another ballot, and number 68 becomes the odd man out.

Das Land ohne Frauen, — Conrad Veidt in his first German talkie.

350

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and number 413 hops in his place. Well, you know who
68 is don't vou ? Try to guess while I tell you more.

Here's the dock. And just look at those boys. And all
this dainty flutter and twitter and holding up of cards.
Numbers dwindle. The big blue eyes of Connie-Boy grow
rounder and rounder, and still rounder.

The animals come in two by tw^o, as of old, and the busy
parsons mop their brows. Tobis with a tin-can orchestra
makes sentimental noises. Rings strung on spikes grow
fewer. At the end there's Connie-Boy, and there's the last
bride, one ahead, already married off ! And what's to be
done ?

The fat man in the bar does surely smell. So the lads,
in celebrating mood, wash him at least to the waist with soda
syphons. Laughter, dwindling to Connie's laughter. They
stare at him uneasily. He is good at hysterics. But they
have a bereft and clinical flavour amid the other kind of
hysteria that is mounting in the audience.

When he is told that he was originally 68, and that 68 has
the woman that was rightfuly his, his eye says trouble ahead,
and 68 is Clifford ^IcLaglen. And the woman is the
Companionate, which is perhaps one reason why Clifford is
in such a hurry to go off after gold, bearing a camel who has
the microphone to himself for the whole of five minutes.

The jealous Connie breaks into the Companionate's room,
and is found there, and there's your reason for the Big Scene.

Night and the shadows falling, and the camera now fondly
believing in mass-rhythm from choice rather than under-
standing, the men turn out, and the cry goes forth : " Lynch
the . . . (when you say that, smile!) " and Connie is frog-

351

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marched off to be broken on the wheel, and succeeds in getting
becomingly stripped in the process. Someone had heard of

Russian Method,'' so giant faces, glistening with sweat,
grin enragedly into the lens.

Meanwhile, as they say, when they meant a cut-back, the
American doctor — who also loves the Companionate, but like
a real gentleman, at her request darts in, and using
the weight of his presence cries halt. The man is mad.
This cannot go on." And ensues a moving pieta with the
victim's lolling head supported in his arms. And the great
big camera keeps turning !

Follows (1) Connie's return to his white-haired mother.

(2) Clifford fighting his companion for the gold
they have found together.

(3) Connie's recovery, and new job as telegraph
operator.

(4) The camel putting his foot through the last
water carrier.

(5) Beginning of sand storm.

(6) The exhausted men tottering across the
desert leading in this crisis of life and death
the camel, which, one understands, is more
generally used for riding on.

(7) Their reaching the last, outpost telegraph
pole, and sending a wire which Connie takes
down.

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(8;

(lo;
(11

(12
(13
(14

(15

(16
(17

(18

(19

(20

Their total collapse.
Sand whistling.

Connie realising from whom the S.O.S.
comes.

Torn fragments of S.O.S. falling in waste-
paper basket.
Rain. Torrents of it.
Gradual recovery of McLaglen.
Last and first great renunciation-in-favour-
of-honour scene between American Doctor
and Companionate.

Return of McLaglen, at last using camel to
ride on.

Doctor's honourable suicide.
Companionate's escape through back door
to doctor's.

Her return home when she finds out what
he meant when he said good-bye.
Clifford singing to his wife, The Girl I
Left Behind."

Connie running along the railway track,
into the embrace of the midnight express,
calling it happily Eveline ".

As for "Connie-Boy ", I'm not responsible. Berlin got
there first. Why talk of images, of light, of form, of unity,
of content and intention, rhythm, montage — all that bunk?
— It's dated. There's nothing like that about Connie Boy,

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And remember .... this is Berlin of the New School.
You will know what to expect.

Now, as to Berlin of the Old School, if you can bear it any
longer, stay with me awhile.

The title is all too suitable.

It is called The Diary of a Lost One,

Pabst directed it, Sepp Algeier was the cameraman,
Louise Brooks was the star, and Valeska Gert outshone her.
If you care for the .whole story, sets were by Erno Metzner-
Emil Hasler, and Mark Sorkin assisted together with Paul
Falkenberg.

Certainly Margarete Bohme's popular romance did not
seem ideal content for a Pabst film. You must either, it
has been shown, be cynical about a Lost One or sentimental.
If you are impersonal simply, you are going to get into
trouble with the censor. That Pabst remained considerably
so is perhaps borne out by the fact that the film we see is
his minus several hundred metres.

It is partly on this account that it does not cohere. How-
ever, though not good as a whole, indeed far from it, it does
give us some of the finest work he has done. The best is
that which deals with the routine of life in a reformatory
for Lost Ones. These astounding scenes, dominated by
A^aleska Gert, have all the epigrammatic wrath, so to speak,
that almost Delphic quality w^hich Pabst alone possesses.

The perception that has built these scenes of riotous,
monotonous, remorseless speed into one hair-raising,
monstrous quietude, has given all that can be given. This
is Pabst. A knowledge of minds, of motives, a beyondness
of seeing that spills no honey-flavour over what he has to

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offer. There is life — mean, angry, consummately cruel,
gay, endearing, triumphant. You either have to swallow it
or get up and walk out*.

Here is something complete, and perhaps to itself a master-
piece of cinema. The story is simply the placing of
Thymian (Louise Brooks) by family-decree in the Institu-
tion, where meals are eaten at a long table, at the head of
which, in black and a ponderous crucifix, sits Valeska Gert
wearing a look of sadistic benignity and comm.anding the
rhythm of the soup-spoons with a baton. Bang, bang,
bang. The rise and fall of spoons offers good rhythm too
for the camera and for the cutting.

^ The technique of this would require an analysis too invoh^ed and too
long for the space at my disposal. It is, of course, concerned primarily
with immediate plunge to essentials. As long as you are dealing w^ith
essentials only — essentials of scenaric composition and explicitness,
essentials of timing, of incident, of dramatic or aesthetic pro-
gression, of utmost visual significance — of image force, in
other words ; of rigid textural and atmospheric parallel, of psychological
mathematics, finding the least common denominator for the utmost in-
dividual recognition : as long as you are discarding any tendency to fuss,
to over-ornamentation, to casual experiment, redundancy, haphazard
camera embroidery, uncertainty of dramatic, rhythmic, visual, mental,
psychic ultimateness — then you are in possession of the first requisite
faculties of a regisseur. Need I say that few possess these qualifications?

That, however, is only the beginning. These things by themselves are
only the machinery, the motive force. The operation of the motive force
is efficient according to the director's culture, sensitivity and understand-
ing. It stands to reason that nothing can be great that he does not feel
as great. The greatest directors forget all these phrases. For mind is
better cinema than any screen. They think no more of latent content
than any author worthy of the name thinks of his grammar primer. It
is the unfortunate critic who remains the grammarian, and the surer his
knowledge the greater his assumption. The regisseur and the critic have
little in common when each gets down to his job.

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Gert's ferocity might be mistaken for some vague soulful-
ness, so completely does it rest her. Pabst caught this in
Joyless Street. At one moment there she leaned on a table,
selling Garbo to a butcher, rather dazed and wan and
immobile. There was something devilish about it. The
same devilishness is here.

After their supper the girls file to bed. They undress in
row^s beside their bunks. At the top of the room now instead
of the table Gert now presides with a gong instead of a baton.
Bang, bang, bang. Every stroke a movement — every move-
ment rhythm, every rhythm a new camera analvsis.
Gathering tempo. Speed, riot, some demented ritual.
Sweat bursts from her forehead. Eyes flashing vulturine
and ecstatic.

Lights out mean a furtive candle. At last there is a
natural re-grouping. Thymian's friend, Erika, jumps up
and sits on her bed. The Diary of the Lost One is brought
out and they discuss it. Erika's ankle swings, making a
natural handle to be grasped, and the gleaming face of the
Gert makes a suitable target to be kicked with it. There is
a moment's panic. Out goes the candle. In the dark a
scamper for the Diary. Chased by Gert, tossed like a ball
from girl to girl.

Rebellion begun, takes flame. The tyrant is seized,
pummelled, mobbed. Her face howls from the screen.
With the gong, on a topmost bed a girl beats out a joyous
tempo for the punishmicnt. Erika now has seized the keys
and signing to Thymian, the two escape unseen. Bang,
bang, bang. The punishment grows wolfish. The audience
roars and stamps participation.

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Pabst's camera is like a busy eye. It plucks at a million
details. Not here and there, dissociated parallels or com-
ments— sheer avid detail builds a raging, intimate riot ; one
vast co-ordination — conditioned-reflex, if you like. You
have been bullied in that house, you have sat in your seat
unable to help, and at last you are freed, and you fight, and
when the gong beats over all, you stamp and cheer, you are
part of the torrent of fists and falling bodies.

That is Pabst as I know him. That is cinema as I know
it. And because of it, the film is important. But now, the
other aspects.

(1) There is a specious and irrelevant sequence of low
comedy in which Sigfried Arno in a false beard spoils the
screen for nearly ten minutes. It was not funny, nor bawdy,
but false as the beard he wore, and had no place in narrative,
in time or space. I cannot imagine why it was not
cut entirely out.

(2) If you are dealing with a Lost One, either you must
deal with her or leave her alone. It doesn't make an atom
of difference that she faints each time she is about to get
what's coming to her — and faint she does, four times, and if
that's not excessive, spare me from something that is.
Indeed, on one occasion, when she faints while dancing and
is waltzed by her partner through a suite of rooms and
literally on to the bed, there is simply nothing to be done
about it. The most avid spectator could hardly bother to go
on looking for so long.

(3) The story is worthless. It points nothing, except a
finger of wrath and scorn at the Institution, as such, and at

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the lower middle class family life which supports, and in
consequence, fills such places; and this would be quite
enough if it were a theme, but it is only an incident — one of
Pabst's few chances to state something, and state it he does.
The rest is the decay of a young woman who does not, in fact
decay, but remains as charming in the end as she was in her
confirmation dress. In any event, the life of a Fallen One,
as such, is surely of interest only to very young people who
are not sure of exactly what it implies.

The reader will gather that it was a very uneven film. It
was. Louise Brooks looked beautiful enough, but she had
nothing to do. She did cry once, some rather collegiate,
sophomore tears, but they were not the kind of tears the^'
v;ere meant to be. Laurels go to A^aleska Gert. To Fritz
Rasp and to Sybille Schmitz, who had a small part in the
beginning and was quite wonderful in it. I would, mvself,
have given her the leading role. She would have been much
better.

This is the material Pabst is given. And he is one of the
few masters of the screen. Of course, if he were given
material worthy of his talents, it would inevitably be censored.

This gives me an idea for a film plot. Let us take a story,
some rather sexv stor}', and let us have two directors each
deciding how to make the film. Let one construct with an
eye to the censor, and the other with honest, explicit truth-
fulness. Show the results in parallel, scene by scene, and
watch Avhich the censor rejects.

There's a capital scenario. But of course, it would be
censored.

Kexxeth Macphersox.

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MECHANISMS OF CINEMA

(Continued) .

When each new development of cinematography is tech-
nically perfected, its " trick " aspect is exploited.

Somebody has said this before, still, it is so important to
my theory propounded in a previous Close Up, that here it is
again.

^Mechanisms of cinema — in the abstract sense — retain a

significance for us when the " trick " novelty has worn offe

* -K-

In general an identity theorem is almost axiomatic . . .
and is an evident-proposition which, like the exasperations of
Euclid, bears a purely intuitive truth difficult in the extreme
of logical proof. In fact to prove something I feel intuitively
is true, IS TRUE, is very often far more trying than the
proof of something not so superficially self-evident.

So I felt when I wrote " The Film in Relation to
the Unconscious " and started off with the (summarised)
statement : — the content of cinema is visually excited mass-
fantasy, having tvco planes of psychic activity — the conscious
and the unconscious — betn^een which is interposed a set of
psychic-visual mechanis772s identical with those of the
Freudian Dream Theory,

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This is my identity theorem.

Technical developments pass through the trick stage, and
emerge as technique

Let us revert to this discussion for a brief space.

Although technically spontaneous, the material of a dream
is drawn from the Unconscious, therefore its latent sources are
unknown to the dreamer . . . exactly like the work of someone
else.

We go to see the " work " of others and call it cinema "
. . . are moved quite irrationally to pleasure, or fear, and
most of the emotions springing from these.

When we have learnt that these irrational emotions
are those of another fellow using the same body and nervous
system as our own, we are on the road to a right under-
standing of one of the outstanding wonders of conscious life.
Impressionism in its fullest development, is what I call it
. . , and the other fellow is the scenario artist.

In this connection I have something to analyse if it is not
rather late ... La Marche des Machines . . . the only abstract
I have seen.

* * *

Deslaw is difficult to follow ... so start with me at the
beginning. I wanted to understand him and this is how 1
interpret his work : —

A sheaf of railway lines flying towards me . . . railway
lines which become only lines in the abstract because they
are no longer like any railway lines I have seen . . . they are
above my head ! I feel I am rapidly approaching somewhere
until I am shocked by a second dimension of motion ... a

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The Stump of an Empire. The factory dining room. The slogan
says — " Against kitchen slavery — for the new life of woman."

A Xew Era film by John Grierson. Drifters. A saga of the herring

fishers.

Louise Brooks and Edith ^leinhard in The Diary of a Lost Woman,
a new fihn bv G. W. Pabst. from the novel by :\Iargarete Bohme.
Cameraman Sepp Allgeier. Sets by Erno Metzner-Emil Hasler.
Pabst-Film"GAI.B,H. for Hom-Film A.G.

The beginning of the dormitory fight in The Diary of a Lost Woman, a
new film by G. W. Pabst. Edith Brooks as Thymian and Edith ]\Iein-

hard as Erika.

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composite motion pattern of great beauty formed by a super-
^'mposed (" condensed ") mirror image of the overhead sheaf
of lines.

Now, what or where am I approaching ? With two
dimensions of rapid forward motion presented to me,
relativity steps in. I must re-orient myself mentally. I fail
to feel either of the motions. Something earthbound in me
is responsible. Much of the perspective effect has vanished,
for " parallel " sheaves of lines perspectively viewed, cross
where they should converge only. There is no depth . . .
no space to rush forward into !

Before I was in motion (mentally) so now I feel a queer
sensation of mental inertia for I must come to rest.

Something similar is quite a common experience : a long
railway journey ... a brief pause in a station . . . another
train draws in on the next line . . . stops . . . then the
strange thing happens. Yes ! . . . we are off at last . . .
see ! we are passing the carriage windows of the other train.
In a moment the mental impression of motion is shattered
. . . . the other train has drawn out, and beyond is the
station kiosk ! We are 7iot moving, and have not moved.
The ensuing momentary impression is one of " pulling up
quickly "... inertia . . . which may actually throw one
forward gently.

Exactly this I felt.

Surely I have arrived? Before I was in motion. Now I
have stopped . . . felt the inertia on ceasing to move
Yes, I have arrived in this land of beautiful machines in
movement; watch them march, polished and sleek, balanced
and balancing.

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Here is the strange optical illusion of the revolving per-
forated drum. Crudely, an optical illusion . . . significantly,
a clever psychological displacement . . . a purely mental
distortion . . . for the perforations have become the things
at which I look. Speed increases. The spots dance.

The have materialised. The rest of the drum has gone !
Again relativity.

And so my responses are played upon, always through
visual impressionism. How heavy that bucket seems, drawn
up by the steel rope slowly . . . lowered faster . . . dravv^n
again slowly. And how^ satisfying when it is going down
. . . how^ tiring its upward movement. I w^ould have been
psychically tensioned to tiredness if it had not finished on
the down stroke. A study in gravitational force.

Then consider the nasty toothed creeper with its slow
sickening motion yet beautiful lozenge pattern . . . the
hideous machine which claws with ' hands of Orlac ' into an
empty bowl as though for ever seeking something fleshv
to murder. Now clutching upwards, now down . . .
practising !

The crane-grab which grabs and swings and is balanced
by its own image, is still a crane grabbing and swinging in
that other dimension w^here all white is black, and black is
white, Deslaw has shown us the exquisite beauty of negative
images in motion. There was profound innermost meaning
in those brief negative shots which defies exact analysis in
this dimension of black on white paper. Something
terrifically fundamental, as though animate bas-relief had
been turned into intaglio from whence it was moulded. . '

Rhythmic noise has a sequence to itself. The mechanical

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forge : the shaping of bars of metal the manifest content . . .
noise the latent content. And how successfully was latent
content " condensed " (to use the new Freudian terminology)
by the visual mechanism of the " mix " into succeeding shots
of cams and tappets higher up on the machine? The noise-
rhythm was ever present in that sequence.

I am in doubt as to whether this noise-rhythm constitutes
real " counterpoint

Very well, here surely should be sound? But I say not.
Why demand a real sound counterpart any more than a real
wetness counterpart to a rain-storm scene ?

The last thing was, quite fittingly, the exhaust of gases
from a tube . . . still pulsing rhythmically . . . the breathing
of the machines as they march. Suggestively, the tube was
away from the face.

^ * ^

In this film the camera revealed itself through the medium
of its limitations. Certain motions were not of suitable
rhythm for cinema. In one shot a flying weight governor
stood still because its rhythm w^as a simple multiple of sixteen

per second. This was observable partially in other shots also.

* ^ ¥^

Are we then to conclude that Deslaw has addressed us
primarily on a sort of " mind-dynamics "... presenting a
series of impressions of mind-motion, inertia, balance,
relativity, and what not, far more vital and understandable
(to most) than the incomprehensibilities of the practical
mathematician? I think so.

What a field there is opened for more work of this kind !

L. Saalschutz.

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SuPeRpRoDuCeR

Of course, we are all familiar with Mr. Silverspan's like-
ness which is reproduced from time to time in that most

exclusive " of fashionable periodicals, Smart People y
where in common with Jimmy Petrikin, Irving Booth, and
that sensation of our advance guard literature. Nana Noos,
the superproducer finds a place of honor in the magazine's
" Hall of Fame " as " the man who has made more dollars
out of the movie-game and has given more pictures with
sophisticatioUy punchy and real art to the world than anyone
we know." That aquiline nose and those sharp eyes,

denoting we are informed by a gentleman of the Press,

shrewdness and genius in business affairs " that heavv
chin to quote the same authority, " characteristic of born
leaders of men " are revealed unmistakablv even on the
printed page.

And although in these scanty lines we may but trace, as it
were, the footprints of the great man on the sands of time,
leaving the weightier business of fathoming the profundities
of his life history to the mighty pen of Billy Doran, the
former butter and egg ad. man, (that Boswell, we may add
in parenthesis, born again and born greater), nevertheless,
movie-fans who know a hero " when they see him will, it
is certain, discover for themselves some moral, some lesson,
something, even in the casual crumbs of wisdom fallen from
the table of the great.

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It is but a sign of Billy Doran's ripened powers as
biographer that in his masterly life of Silverspan which took
the country by storm, The Yacht that Xickels Built, he
follow^s to the limit Schiller's dictum that art consists also in
knowing what to omit. To speak of the superproducer's
inauspicious beginnings at the bottom as a " pants maker
to reveal the fact that while in his cups the gentleman is not
what you might term " safe for democracy laying upon
occasion, as a matter of fact, a heavy hand on his own better
half, (a moral trait which the forgiving Press now describes
as the delightful eccentricitv of a mondain) is not at all Billy's
method who uses artistic restraint, discretion, and a refine-
ment of taste not discoverable in writers of meaner powers.
The future historian examining the records of the dark ages,
so to say, of Silverspan's sartorial existence will be in a
position to speak more freely than any contemporaries who
often write of the movies with a view to a little contract or so.

The eager world always clamouring for news of its truly
great men, must be content to know Silverspan only in
moments when he shares with the public the burden of his
thoughts. Climbers to the top sometimes take the bottom
with them. However, in the case of our hero time and
intercourse with professionals have bestowed among other
virtues that sometimes go with money making that aplomb
and savoir faire ^\ to borrow another gem from Billy Doran,
which give weight to every utterance of his. It is at a
momentous period in the history of the drama that we
discover him on board of a transatlantic liner besieged by
members of the Press always willing to gather the manna
from Silverspan's lips unburdening himself on a topic of

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universal interest. " Well, boys/' he addressed on that
famous occasion the assembled reporters, eagerly pencilling
down each precious syllable of the famous man's utterance,
" I suppose ye're waiting for me to tell vou something about
the ' talkies.' You can tell the world for me we've got the
goods. It's great, great business, great dramatic stuff, great
money-maker. Mark my w^ord, the ' talkies ' will sweep the
four corners of the earth. Everywhere there's a colossal
demand for them. Yes," and here the great man paused to
flick off the ashes of his aromatic Havana, " and don't you
forget for a moment, I'm going to stress this point for the
benefit of some cranks, there's plentv of art in the ' talkies
for everybody's taste. Let me give you a single example.
You fellows write, so you will get right away what I mean.
Here, at the opening of a scene are several people playing
cards in a hotel-room, a private house, or wherever it may
be. Well, all of a sudden, mind vou, while everything is
nice and quiet, out comes a yell out of nowhere ' MURDER '
. . . Imagine the effect on the audience. That's what I
mean, boys, that's what I mean ..." he dismissed the over-
awed gentlemen of the Press with a triumphant smile and a
wave of his cigar-stub.

Again the deft hand of the master-biographer " seizes
his subject at a moment of addressing a large assembly of
ambitious college students listening to the successful be-
diamonded person, not without the secret hope of emulating
his great career. Now, boys," Silverspan began his
famous speech (partly republished here), " if I'm going to
bother giving you a few valuable hints on this little Drama

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business of ours, it's because Tve been aching for a long,
long time to give a piece of my mind to some of you educated
fellows, writers and others. Oh, yes, yes, you've got the
knowledge, college degrees, Latin, and all that, but you have
not got all the brains in the world, as may be some of you
" intellectual " folks will realize some day. Go into my
offices sometimes and see for yourself : they're full of college
graduates working for a man who's never seen the inside
of an institution. Let me tell you the meaning of all this :
' Where a man's purse is, there his heart is No matter
what your business is, watch out where the dough comes in
from. What's a man making shoes for? What's a prize-
fighter getting his inside all busted up for? What's all the
boys and girls trying to get a job in the movies for ? Foi
CASH is the answer. Say," and here Silverspan warmed
up to his breathless audience, look at all these highbrow
English, Scotch, and other foreign writers whose books
we've made into movies, the Kiplings, Barries, and the rest
of them. Why, we trim their work to suit ourselves, and
they dance to our tune, because money talks, always has and
always will be. (Applause). Now I never read any books;
I have more important things to do. But I know that
Shakespeare and those other old boys are full of hokum that
any writer working in my plant can do as well and better.
Proof? Look at the cash receipts. Perhaps you see now
that I do know something about my Drama business. Well,
one of these days maybe, when I can take some time off for
myself, I'll put it all between covers for you young folks to
read. Remember, my first principle of the Drama is : * Give
the public what it wants '. And always remember too that

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in our business we make MEN as well as good shows."
Silverspan ended on a high moral note.

As has been intimated, the biographer is not at all back-
ward in painting the picture of his hero's " virtues.
" Personality sophistication executive ability

" stick-to-itiveness are with him the four cardinal virtues,
and " personality " is, of course, the greatest of these.
Nevertheless, whether out of modesty or superabundance of
material, the writer omits to mention that in the intimacy of
his office-room, especially, after a drink or so, Silverspan was
wont to unburden himself of his weightier thoughts from
which posterity, if it cares to, may learn a great deal. It is
thus from as yet unpublished records that we are permitted
to acquaint the world with Silverspan 's theory of the Drama
when he unlocked the mysteries of his soul to Jimmy Perkins,
the winner of the National Scenario Contest, the author of
The Canadian Patrol, newly enrolled among the elite of
Silverspan's scenario writing intelligentsia. Jimmy Perkins
requires a chapter all to himself. Suffice it to say now that
never has anv man had a more attentive or more worshipful
audience than Silverspan had in Jimmy Perkins.

Do vou know," the grand old man of the movies groaned
thru clouds of smoke, " what's put the business on its
feet? Well, sir. Til bet you a nickel you'll never guess.
Give you three guesses. D'ye give up? — Pie is the word.
The great old, American institution, the apple pie, the
custard pie, the cream whipped pie that every comedian in
the country threw around for years till he was blue in the
face. The dear public was cool, shy of the business, until
some clever bov, I think they ought to put up a monument

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to him, saw the light and gave them PIE. And how the
people did flock to the shows, you know all about it. We've
all bought ourselves yachts and limousines out of that first
pie-money. Well, of course, pie is not d la mode any more,
you might say, need a different class of show nowadays.
But there's one staple article that the movies will always use,
and never mind who says ' no ' Legs, legs, and some
more legs ' is what I've been preaching to my directors and
waiters ever since I've been in the business. The men come
for the legs, the women for the costumes and for the hand-
some fellows. That's that, and John Rollstone says it
mighty w^ell in that whale of an article he wrote once. (See
Close Up for July '29). Give them an undress show, as the
police lets you and watch the mob at the ticket office,
reverends, censors, good people and all.

Well, sir, you may not be too old to remember that after
the pie and the falling downstairs business came the Vamp.
And the vamp has come to stay, no matter w^hat they say to
the contrary. Our stars keep us well posted about their
correspondence. You'd be surprised to hear that a great
many women write to say that they wish they were in the
vamp's place. It's the women who make up most of the
vamp's fans, get that straight. A sex appeal picture will
usually make more money than a ^ crook ' picture a
' mystery ' picture, a Russian picture or a Jewish comedy.
Occasionally, when we have a colossal genius like that
German actor we can put over something big without sex
appeal. But the general run of picture always leans towards
^ sexy ' stuff. Any girl w^ho has Mt ' is w^elcome to my
business, but they're not to be found on a vacant lot."

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* 'That's what I say," Perkins reports as having ventured
to say.

Tm telling you, Buddy," Silverspan continued, " I've
got the whole Drama business classified, from A to Z. First
in the lot come the ' sex ' pictures, and that includes the
sheik stuff, the gold diggers, the sophisticated society play,
the Broadway picture, the ' Clown with the Broken Heart '
movie, practically the cream of the industry. Next to this
staple article is the ' mystery ' or ' crook ' picture, because
the dear public likes almost as much a good crook picture
with some shooting in it as they do a leg show.

Of course, we've got a few side lines that are always big
money producers. Kentucky troubles always go over big.
South seas, Jewish comedies, Russian Aristocracy, all about
those naughty counts and dukes who fall in love with our girls,
Canadian Patrol, Chinatown stuff, and Parisian sin are all
good market articles. And if a picture is a grand success,
it don't hurt to repeat it under a different name. Let's say,
if Broadway Flappers is a money maker, then we change the
plot around a bit and call it Broadway Jazz, and there you
have another knock-out. There you have the whole thing in
a nutshell, you might say, the whole drama business that
all these wiseacres write about without knowing the first
principle. Short and sweet, take it or leave it.

" You may wonder, perhaps, why we took your Canadian
Patrol picture in preference to a lot of other mighty good
scenarios in the National Contest. What I want in my
business is a lot of young fellows who are willing to learn,
none of your highbrows that are eager to tell me what to do.
Not that I can't appreciate originality like when you make

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the crook in your picture hide in a tree. I could see the
point right away. We'll buy out any man's original ideas
whether he calls himself Shakespeare, or Jimmy Perkins.
Well, that's why you are here to-day under contract, my
boy."

" Well, old top," he indicated the end of the audience by
a shifting of the chair, "I'd better be moving, got a lot of
hard work ahead of me yet. Pete Heineman, my director,
Rosa del Oro, and myself are going for a yacht trip to frame
a movie that's going to take the world by storm. Between
me, and you, and the telephone pole, Rosa is a peach of a
girl, some personality, she can soak her socks in my coffee
any day."

And Jimmy Perkins went out into the air, the faint aroma
of a Havana cigar lingering about him like the august
memory of the Presence he had just quitted. And like the
seers of old, foretasting future bliss, he saw himself in his
mind's eye mounting rapidly that ladder of SUCCESS which
leads from the bottom of twenty-a-week pay envelopes, dirty
press rooms, sneers of " superiors " to that desirable heaven
where Publicity Agents attend w^ith baited breath the steps
of Majesty, where left-handed affairs with " girlies " are
considered by broad-minded, truly Christian Gentlemen of
the Press but as pardonable, extravagances of super-
sophisticated geniuses, and the society of princes, counts,
millionaires, " beauties ", politicians, bootleggers, short
story w^orld champions, and adoration, and adulation, and
" parties ", bank accounts, and more bank accounts are but
in the daily round of life . . .

And he saw all this and it was good. Michael Stuart.

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THE STUMP OF AN EMPIRE

(Production of the Leningrad Sovkino Studio, 1929).

Director — F. Er:\iler.

Scenario — Catherine Vinogradskaya.

Operator — E. Schneider.

Why The Stump of an Empire, and what does the film
tell? What are the questions it raises, and what the replies
it suggests?

The Stump of an Eynpire tries, most acutely and earnestly,
to total the tremendous constructive work accomplished in the
USSR after the October Revolution. And, first of all, it
speaks of the achievements attained bv the workers.

In the turmoil of our every-day w^ork, whirled away by the
powerful tempo of the day, we have lost perspective on
actuality. We must fall back for a spell that we may per-
ceive how much of the new and unusual there is hidden for
the brain, the ear and the eye of an outsider (a kind
of " Stump of an Empire ") in terms by now, conventional
for us, like — Factory Committee, Labour Protection Com-
mittee, etc.

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You will find in this film numerous episodes and numerous
slogans which are of the greatest importance and are exactly
a reflection of the modern Soviet ideals.

The Stump of an Empire is permeated by the most acute
political problems of the moment. These include questions
of Socialist construction, of culture, of production relation-
ships, of labour discipline, Socialist competition and,
finally, the " General Human problem of love and
marriage. All these tasks, these problems, are linked up,
moulded together within the main theme of the film.

The subject of The Stump of an Empire is quite simple
... At a certain railway station, so far away that it is lost
in the endless steppes, toils a former soldier, who, as a result
of a contusion received during the 1914-18 war had lost his
memory. He is Filimonoff, an ex-X.C.O. (Trains hurl by.
Before his sleeping memorv life is passing, rushing with all
speed). And suddenly, through the window of a train he
sees a face. A face which is familiar, w^hich has been near
and dear to him. In vain he tries to recall the face, but his
memory slumbers on. Only a miserable debris of it can he
catch, and this too is easily distracted, even by a cigarette
box.

The train has left. Nothing has happened.

Filimonoff had been a hosier by profession. The tap-
tapping of a sewing machine aids him to reconstruct,
mentally, his past life. The tap-tapping of the machine —
as the cracking of the machine-gun. The machine-gun, the
front ... In the depths of his slumbering memory flash,
suddenly, tiny sparks, tatters of recollection ... The battle

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front, blazing streaks of swiftly moving searchlights, cruci-
fixions on the fields of Galicia and that calm Cyclops — the
Tank — crushing fallen bodies with cold relentlessness . . .

Filimonoff has remembered . . . He jumps into a cattle-
car bound for Leningrad (which still is " St. Petersburg "
for him) to seek his wife.

Here begins a story picturing the re-birth of a man w^ho
has returned from a dark, a blind existence as Non-com-
missioned Officer Filimonoff, to a consciousness of his power
and the all-powerful triumph of his victorious class.

The main perception of this man lies in his feeling of class
interest concerning all that goes on about him. The makers
of the film do not lead Filimonoff to stop in ecstasy before
the pathetics of our day, but thrust him boldly into the clash
of social conflicts where he finds his full recognition of social
consciousness. It is characteristic that his first conscious
idea — reminiscence of the war — brings home sharply his
class relation to war. The film is, in this respect, the first
and most powerful production of the working class with an
international point of view. It's our own Soviet Remarque
and our point of view of the w^ar.

A new relationship to labour brings about and dictates new
social forms of relations between chiefs and subordinates,
between men and women, between Red Commander and
private. A series of shocks brings the hero to the problem
which must have appeared fundamental to his still immature
labour psychology.

Who^s the boss? "

And the film replies :

The working collective is the boss

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Only when the man has mastered this problem does his
psychology begin to grasp and unravel other problems.

Seeing his neighbour working on the next bench drinking
Vodka, he cries : " And you are boss ? You're a rogue ! "

The Stump of an Empire ends with the following sub-title :
^'We have still much work to do, comrades ^^ This ending
is particularly significant as the Film is deeply rooted in the
social and political life of the Soviet country. It calls, not
to sentimental self-worship, but to indefatigable, tireless
work and frank admittance of errors and difficulties.

The Film was produced and mounted in 14 months. The
location scenes were shot in Odessa, Leningrad and
Kharkov, but all scenes taken in these cities have been
mounted as though belonging to one city; by this it is de-
sired to point out that it was the aim of director F. Ermler
to give the general aspect of this newly constructed country,
a synthetic portrait of socialist construction.

The Stump of an Empire is only the fifth production of
Ermler and his group. A film made by him is known in
Europe : Katka — the Paper Ranet (They who Live by the
Street — in German: Die Von der Strasse Leben).

P. Attasheva.

Moscow, October, 1929.

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OVER THE MOON

It was the cow that did it first, and Fritz Lang followed.
Forgive me, please. What an extraordinary world it was.
Why did the cow jump over the moon ? Did she feel drawn to
it bv dairy-associations with cheese, and did she with one
fell hoof kick the (milk) bucket and jump to a dimension
where the only cheese was dead, and inorganic moon ? Then
again, why is the cat always credited with interest in the
fiddle, and not the dog? The dog, you will remember, only
barked — to see such fun. But the cat went with the fiddle,
perhaps in an effort to improve its voice, foreseeing the days
of a synchronised Felix, but in any case, who knows? The
fun the dog liked was nothing he saw in the cinema, in those
days, and if we wished to have this absurd series of events
pan-chronised, what kind of a kingdom would it be? The
movies leave it alone. The screen is the window of
fantasy but this special fantasy and all it means, if any-
thing, and what it did to us, a lot, has the blind pulled over
it. We say, a man of imagination should do this for us. A
man of imagination should bring wit and amusement to the
screen, and we get Lotte Reiniger, which isn't quite the
same. And Robert Florey isn't really witty And then
again, we don't want wit that is the intellectual substitute

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for humour, we want wit that isn't a substitute for anything,
but a dash in the way of serving, a smile in the way of
looking, a satire and sympathy, and w^e can go on talking
like this, and projecting our own selves over a metaphysical
moon, until we fail to notice what is happening at our feet.
And I am very fond of what my feet are in touch with.

I meant to write flatlv on sound imagerv, and I have begun
saying hey-diddle-diddle, and got struck, thinking how
often critics present the spectacle of moon-jumping cows.
For the moon is a good way out of it when you
are confronted with something new on earth, tak-
ing the moon as exotic symbol. Confronted with some
new growth, which needs trouble and inward-delving to
understand, and, perhaps of more immediate im-
portance to you, fresh vocabulary to write with
.... confronted with a forest of unblazed talkie-trees, it
is easy to flv to the moon and dig up a bit of old cheese
•(historical value), growing, alive — O, yes, but the wrong
wav round. Jump over the moon and return with some
•Griffith gorgonzola or a piece of Camembert Chaplin.
Everyone wmH believe vou if you write about the revolutions
Chaplin wrought, even if they think his films the worst
argument you could possibly adduce, even if The Circus
seems to them a danse macabre of daguerreotypes. Again,
you can gnaw bits off the moon when there is nothing else,
you imply, worth your attention. Write about an exotic
actor, detect (laudibly, but a trifle lavenderishly) hints of
Russian, O, damn that w^ord, cutting in an old Essanay,
and miss, just because they are ordinary, the exciting things
.that are happening on nice-smelling earth.

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It is well that people should keep alert their Diogenes
lamp and light up the odd corners of the screen (though I
always had an idea he brought a few cobwebs out of his tub) ;
it is well to have everything dug up and recorded, Glozel as
well as Luxor, but it is a pity to be so engrossed in moon-
jumping that you miss the cat with its fiddle, three times
daily, on earth. You are so likely to because this cat isn't
photographed or silhouetted, is just a comic drawn cat. But
it actually is comic, adjective from comedy, not from music-
hall. Yes, don't miss the cartoon shorts because you only
go in for the big picture. I have seen them lately at the
Carlton, the Capitol, Mme. Tussaud's (let us now praise
Mr. Ogilvie). When the film was bad, they saved my life;
when the film was good, what an excellent cocktail they
were !

I went in to see Four Feathers. Annoyed, angered,
I-knew-it-ed. Good things, of course, good things, but
some would have been excellent if they'd been let alone, not
dolled up with a story and actors who, though among the
pleasantest maybe in Hollywood, were here distasteful by
their inappropriateness. But before, there had been a Micky
Mouse Cartoon that I laughed at and liked. I don't
remember laughing so much or being let down so little after
one funny bit, since talkies w^ere in. I have always liked the
cartoon films, despite the name. The French, in this,
manage this better; they call them " dessins animes ", and
the Tribune Libre once had a seance consecrated to them.
Felix and Krazy Kat, even Inkwell Imp are my friends, and
here and now I would like to stake a protest against using
Felix to typify popular entertainment with a sneer. He is

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one of the most intelligent ideas on the screen, as I shall
suggest why.

I make a point of seeing these curious black drawings in
their transit across the screen, but this one at the Carlton
happened to be the first one synchronised that I really
registered. I saw a Krazy Kat in Paris, Beaches and Scream ;
it was a verv good one. I had seen it silent, and its
mechanical music made it no better. Then some British dog
was shown at the Tivoli with barks and noises which were
quite literal and wTong for a flat drawn dog. Sound was
here misused, and it was a very common little dog. It didn't
even raise the problem, why was it no better. It was a British
film, and bad British films just make one shudder and with-
draw, close-in in self-defence against so much muddled
violation of truth and technique and taste. One never
succeeds, though one has enough practice, in extracting any
problems from a bad British film, whereas a bad American
one bristles with points. The British pup meant nothing,
and I let it go, without being stirred to think of sound in the
future applied to animated draw^ings. There was so much
else to consider about sound, the synchronised cartoon as a
problem only cropped up among the Four Feathers, cropped
up, I suppose, because I was ready to consider them.

The Carlton had When the Cat's Away, One saw the cat
go away. Not very imaginative so far. But already funnv ;
one heard the tunes, and the tune had the same burlesque
emphasis of the essentials as the flat broad jumps of the cat.
It locked its door, clatter-ping-click. Took out a bottle and
drank, gurgle-splash and Little Brown Jug All serious,
as regards the technical synchronising. That is part of the

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joke, that the score is really not so crude as whatever it was
they dished up for The Godless Girl, The cat then hopped
over the hills, to the obvious tune ; the absurdity of drawn
cat going so solemnly away underlined by the music being
what a score-scratcher would naturally think suitable; " far
away " indicated on the film, therefore that tune in the script,
no matter what may be the circumstances or status of the
person going far away. The mouse now appears and now
we have fun in the cinema. Another one pops up, and is
made into a key with which to unlock the door. Body
elongates, and tail is twisted into a handle. Mice multiply
as if by magic, and indeed it is by magic ; there were two
standing there, and they go in, and yet the same tw^o, or as
like as makes no difference, hop up again, and another same
two and another. Two of whom leap at the piano when they
enter the cat's house. They hop on the keys, and we hear
what they do. There is a piece of music on the piano, and
they play it by hopping out the chords ; other mice rush up
and down the stops of the saxophone. It is funny to think
of mice playing pianos this way. We think how funny it
would be if they did. I knew a rat that used to come out
and perch on my editor's table, sitting on the blotter to
nibble his notepaper, after we had left. It would have been
a pretty picture. I never saw it, but I knew the rat. I know
these mice, and I see them doing things like that rat did.
I see, whereas with the rat I had to imagine. I see mice
doing what I had to imagine. I also hear them doing what
T imagine, and that is not so easily brought about usually.
You can always draw or write what you see in your mind's
eye, but it is not so easy to impart to people in sound the

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noises you hear in your mind's ear, with your ear's mind.
To see mice playing a piano by dancing on it we have been
used to ; we would have liked to have heard them too, but we
have not been able to, so we have suppressed it, and half the
laughter that greets these sound cartoons is due to- release.
That is what leader-writers call " responding to a noveltv ".

At the end of the piece, they bow, and turn over another
one. Lieber Augustin " followed by " Listen to the
Gentle Mocking Bird ". One of the mice does a barlet to
it, and being rather vain and getting out of time through
indulging in solo turns and balancings, is frowned at by
the other mouse, who stops this particular turn when the
piece is over. He sees that the piano is a pianola. There
ought to be some rolls. It is the privilege of these films that
they decided early that whatever ought to be, should be,
being in this way at once pre, or post, and super-
Eden. There are no rolls, but there is a nice piece of
Gruyere cheese. The audience no sooner sees the cheese
than it recognises the studded holes and associates them with
the perforations of the pianola rolls. You couldn't get this
immediate response any other way. When you think what
has been done in this small piece of association, you will
admit it is remarkable. The cheese is placed in the pianola,
and plays gaily along. Where there is a string of holes close
together, we hear a delicious trill (which startles the mice).
The effect on the mind of a piece of cheese in a drawn pianola
producing real, heard notes, is complex. The cheese comes
unfixed, and flops down, boom, boom, boom, boom, on the
keys, until the resourceful mouse pins it down, and

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we proceed to watch the others, but first consider to ourselves
what we have really watched. Some records are found.

It would dismay most people to find first a pianola with
no rolls and then some records about, with no machine.
They would " talk nasty about fate. But these creatures
are their own fate, and the most fated of them squats down,
is twisted round and round by the tail until he may be
considered wound up, and in the process has his neck made
nicely spiral. The record is then put on his upheld nose,
and as he spins round, another mouse plays it with his tail.
All of this is made possible, made into a coherent world
because the artist back of it is noticing. He notices what
things are like, and when he has half an actual thing, he
supplements it with something like it, and so by degrees and
without knowing it, invents a world of metaphysical mice,
using associational symbols. The record cracks, the mouse
winds down, and peculiar noises ensue. The sound is as
funny and un-actual as the event, and for once in a film is
as funny as the picture.

There is a mouse jazz-band, and mice dancing. A
marvellous burlesque of screen tango, and wholly amazing-
close-ups of the jazz-band which, for sheer getting there,
are so much more unkind than the actual close-ups of
semi-erotic inanity brayed out by half-cast ill-breds in over-
done misfits. If it is absurd for mice to stamp and sway
as if they were mad, how much madder, we suddenly think,
must these aforementioned gentlemen be. Mouse-head hey-
heying is the last comment on Vitaphone shorts and
Broadway attitude, and big business in its O how off-
moments.

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At the Capitol, a cat got its tail caught in a mouse-trap.
Whereupon its intended victim leapt aboard, careering round
as a surf-rider. At Tussaud's, before The Glad Rag Dolly
which there is no reason to stay away from, I saw^ The Opry
House, This is the animals' vaudeville show\ To
appreciate it, vou must have the mouse angle on life in your
mind. Realise that the cat is always w^hat one is up against,
the mouse's race-problem, as it were. Moreover, these films
are the mouse's relief from life, rodent relaxation. If mice
had the motion-picture habit, they would enjoy these films.
And since it is you who are seeing them, you must approach
as nearly as vou can to the correct mouse outlook. Then
you will understand why it is natural to have, instead of a
row^ of bells, a set of cats sitting on a shelf. When the
band wants a chime of bells, a mouse just pulls all their tails
quickly. One after another, kitten, small cat, cat, big cat,
mother, father, patriarch. Yi, yu, vow, YOW. Cat-calls
are the sweetest music to a mouse's ear.

The show^ begins and one plays the piano. When two of
the notes w^ill not do what he w^ants, he punishes them. He
ties them together in a knot. The piano resents him, and
turning its front legs into paws, it sends him flying. Then
it curves its new-found hands up from underneath and plays
itself itself. You see the chain ; legs, paw^s, hands. This
is most natural. A piano has legs, so it is given leg-
properties. These are its front legs, so they are given front
leg properties, and front legs being equivalent to hands, it
plays the notes. Later, thinking that its keyboard is really
rather like a set of teeth, the artist gives it a mouth, and lets
it take its curtain smiling and bowing. This freedom of

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imagery has always been one of the delights of the cartoon
film. There was Felix's tail, which could become anything
from a state of mind to an implement, hook, rope, or wheel.
I always wanted Mr. Ogilvie to revive some of the Fehx
films ; I hope the new series will be as good.

In Beaches and Scream there was one seqence which was
so rare, that I will describe it although I have already written
of it before. Krazy Kat bathes. The sea is cold. He
jumps out, encased in a block of ice. The sea is therefore
cold. You have been told it quite simply, but with very
little connection. He jumps into water, and jumps out
in a block of ice. There is no simile or slow approach. It
is quick, as if you were to say he turned on the tap and
drove icicles into his face. People would at once say that
if the tap was running, there could be no icicles. So you
are stopped a lot of fun, and cannot sav this sort of thing
as quickly as you think it, which always seems to me a pity,
and why do we write, I should like to know, and when we
can't do that sort of thing, WHY do we write?

The next thing is that the sea should be warm. So The
Kat lights a fire under it. The sea is foamy at the edge,
like a fringe. But we have no need to insert that word.
The sea simply has a fringe, and therefore is a carpet, and
can be lifted up. But still being sea, it is displeased and
fringes being fingers, it is a hand that leans out to smiack
the cat.

The simple high spirits take vou up with them so much
that you don't notice the significance of what is being done,
the extremely abstract qualitv of the film, the complete
reliance on imagery. You don't see, unless vou have learnt

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to, that you are watchino', in this cat cartoon, a compHcated
succession of thoughts, feelings, reactions in a wild but con-
trolled rush of imagery. You don't get that vou are seeing
something expressed for once exactly as your mind works.
It isn't made simpler, or linked up more, or less quick in its
transitions. Half of this is due to the fact that it is drawn
cat and a drawn mouse. They never existed, save in the
author's mind, and so they are untrammelled and un-
representational. The screen here reallv is the plate of the
author's mind. We are watching what has never happened
anywhere else. Watching it absolutelv clear, as he drew
it. Not people who did not exist acted by people who exist
differently, but mouse that never was expressing mouse
that never was. Essence of mouse, free to move as swiftly
and peculiarly as the mind. And all the time to be quite
clear to evervone as to what thev mean, which is so re-
markable. Of course, if vou told people what thev were
going through when thev saw Mickv Mouse, they would be
confused and no longer able to enjoy him. As it is, they
accept him quite readily and naturall}', mind in the fauteuil
responds to mind back of the screen.

Where else, in what other way, could you make your tail
not onlv a bottle when you are thirsty, but a corkscrew as
well ? And then, when you begin to " see things ", convert
it into a telescope to see them with, and, finally, still have it
readv as an exclamation mark to express your surprise,
which is so like a comet that you at once ride oft' on it, to
be seen again, as the iris closes, next week, tea and chocolates
in the interval ?

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This imagery is as real as that which tallcs of the " sea-
horses " or, up in the Arctic, calls some goddess of rough
weather, Bloody Haired And here strangely, sound is
perfectly in key with this kind of imagery. Sometimes it
is literal, working across the idea of the picture, and that is
funny; sometimes it is literal when the picture is literal, when
a tub is a tub, and when the tub has become a gasometer, it
is still tub-music, which is adding to our state of mind,
giving it layer. Sometimes the sound is imagery w^hen the
picture is not, and sometimes it is plainly comic, as when a
goat plays his beard when his violin breaks. You can never
tell how the dog will break or w^hat sound the cat will make
with the fiddle, but the film itself knows. Mouse-dance to
straight human music is funny when that mouse-dance is also
burlesque of human dance. And it is funny, and releasing
too, to hear weird new noises, the sound of a mouse at play
or the triumph of a mouse-group, yow^ls and honks and new
distortions. These films are the first to be generally made
and shown as a matter of course in w^hich sound is used as
it should be, and the result it not just a film with funny
music attached, but all the pow-ers of association heightened
by the combining of picture and sound ; together they make
something neither could have made alone, a more potent
inroad into our consciousness.

Being drawings, everything happens under our eyes ;
piano legs turn to Paderewski hands, sea to carpet, crow^ded
train to sardine tins, all conceived in movement. It is not
only that they are full of action, but that everything that
goes on in the minds of the animals is seen as it goes on, in
moving imagery. And being drawings, what the mouse

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imagines is seen in the same dimension, of the same world
as the mouse itself. Drawn, and so equally real. Sea
turning to dragon does not turn to a plaster or even
a Hollywood tame one, but to a real drawn dragon, as real
as the sea which is drawn.

The creator of the Micky Mouse sound films is Walt
Disney, and he works for Paramount. For myself, when-
ever I find these on, I find ten minutes of real cinema, sound
and silent .... but they are slight films, shorts, not to be
elevated and cultivated. To be taken for what they are, with
a certain amount of realising that thev are more than you
may think, and not to be missed because " I only go in for
the big picture, I really couldn't sit through a whole dreadful
programme."

Robert Herring.

KINO AND LICHTSPIEL

There is a similarity between the German film and the
F'rench. It is the similarity of the studio and the atelier.
But the similarity ceases very soon, for the French cinematist
takes his atelier outdoors ; the German cinematist puts his
outdoors into the studio. The German film has never left the

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studio. That is one of the gravest limitations in the German
kino. It thwarted a film like Homecoming, made the entire
rendering of AspJialt false. Certainh* the studio structure
is essential to some films : it was the success of The Last
Laugh. But if the Germans insist upon their studio filming,
they must be willing to omit certain themes and contents
from their consideration.

The problem, however, is larger than this. The German
mind, as revealed in the film, is the mind for the principle.
The Germans have given the cinema some of its major
principles, but have seldom been the ones to realize these
principles. To the world's cinema the German film has
been most important. But to itself it has contributed only
formulas in theme and construction. Therefore the German
kino has realh' never developed. In brief, in German\' it
is the artisan-mind that prevails, not the artist-mind. The
principle-mind, not the creation-mind.

The principles the Germans have given to the cinema are :

(1) The integration of light, decor, performer . . .

(2) The thematic narrative . . .

(3) The cinema pre-plan . . .

(4) The eft'ective submission of the actor . . .

(5) The camera as a major instrument . . .

(6) In sum, control and discipline . . .

As details or stresses of these principles one mav include :
the maturity of the actor, the constructed, in place of
recorded-cinema, the film as uninterrupted visual imagery,
and so forth. It is apparent that the German contribution
is most tremendous. But how far have the Germans gone
in the realization of these principles? Take certain

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examples : The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, Torgus or The
Coffin-Maker, The Last Laugh, The Last Fiacre of Berlin,
The Wax-Figure Cabinet, The Street . . . Take the work
of Ernest Lubitsch, Paul Leni, Lupu Pick, Arthur Robison,
Ludwig Berger, Fritz Lang, Georg Pabst . . . The Cabinet
of Doctor Caligari.

It will seem sacrilegious on my part, to many enthusiasts,
were I to sav that this is not a great film. Indeed I shall
say with Leon ^loussinac that it is not a work of art, but a
film date. You will find that the enthusiasts are usually
painters or people who think and remember graphically,
never cinegraphically. Gilbert Seldes, the American
journalist, writing in the new volumes of The Encyclopaedia
Britannica, speaks of the film thus :

Without immediate eft'ect on public or producers, this
film is memorable because of its effects on the critics ; it may
be said that Caligari created motion-pictures criticism in
England and America. i French critics hold it in low esteem
because of its elaborate scenario ; vet even they allow its
chief virtues : that it worked chieflv through the camera
(although the subtitles in the American presentation were
lengthy and frequent) and broke entirely with realism on the
screen . . . Caligari means that the motion picture must be
created not photographed ..."

Mr. Seldes has said nothing in his commentary to indicate
the merit of the film itself as realization. He has indicated
the principle or principles which it exemplified. Xor is he

1 This is not altogether true, and I shall have something to say of this
in a later paper. Wliat Mr. Seldes may mean is that it made movie
criticism for ^Ir. Seldes. • : • •- -

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correct in asserting that the objection of the French critics
was to the elaborateness of the scenario. The objection of
the absolutists — Leger for instance — was, at that time, to
any scenario at all, any narrative scenario that is. Caligari
was, if anything, naively simple in its content. Indeed, one
of my objections is the general objection I have to the
simplism of German fantasy, of which I shall speak later.
But the major objection to Caligari was and still is that, while
it intended integration of light, decor, performer and mood
of narrative upon a defined sequence, its structure, its quasi
cubist-expressionist structure, was that of the stage-
illustration. That, in fact, with its infantile non-realism,
was its appeal. Of Torgus I have spoken in an earlier
article. The Last Laugh:

Seldes says of this film :

" Films without subtitles had appeared before: the dis-
tinction of this one was that everything the picture had to
say, and it said some subtle things, was said by the means
of the camera. What is more, the correlation of scenes was
perfect, the separate sequences held together, and needed no
connection or explanation." This is rather elementary
discovery. The importance of The Last Laugh is multiple
and more transcendant than Mr. Seldes indicates. It set
down the first form of the cinema : the simple universal
theme without complexity of narrative details. And it
realized, as well as articulated in intention, the principle of
constructed, unvacillating environment converging upon the
character in relief. It is, to my mind, the onlv German film
I have ever seen that, working upon an inclusive principle

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and a definite preconception, has realized itself. That is
why F. \V. Murnau remains for me the most effective of
German directors, although for philosophic sincerity I look
elsewhere : perhaps to Paul Czinner.

An exception. I think here of Vanina, made by von
Gerlach, who died prematurely. I leave this film out of the
consideration of German films. It is the film of films which
indicated the path of plastic fluidity the cinema should have
taken but never took. Its rhythmic structure is not German,
nor has it been apprehended as a pivotal source by the land
where it has been most appreciated, France. Perhaps
there have been attempts to follow VaninUy but those films
which may have been such ventures (as I detect the likely
ones) seem to be following its faults rather than its rhythmic
precept. Indeed most directors of Paul Wegener seem to
remember Vanina for Paul Wegener rather than von Gerlach.

Karl Grune made The Street,'^ It too was admirable in
its reduced statement of the pathetic adventure of the man.
It too emphasized the organisation of the light in the mood.
But it did not maintain its mood nor its temper of pathos. I
think this is due to two traits exhibited by most German
directors : the infidelitv of their emotional concern, and their
unawareness of the difference between the structure of melo-
drama and that of tragedy. I should go on to say that these
two traits are the same and they are closely related to the
artisan-outlook of the German director and his affection for
the studio.

^ The failure of both Vanina and The Street before the tribunal of
American movie critics indicates the absence of any instinct for first
laws in that high body.

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I have never seen a German film that attained beyond
tragi-pathos. What is a most frequent literary source for
the German film? The writings of Sudermann. Certainly
Sudermann was not a writer of the tragedy of man. He
was a fabricator. He has the episodes of Lagerlof, of Hardy,
of Ibsen, but not their cumulative exposal. Or similarly
Frank Wedekind. He compiled social dramas. His works
were fabrications too. Therefore Pabst's Liilu is a fabrica-
tion. The film, (I am speaking generally) like water, never
rises above its source. That is a first law of art. The
entire German cinema, with several notable exceptions, turns
toward the fabricated. That is the artisan-mind, the studio-
mind, the mind that delights in virtuosities, in camera
sketchings, in fringe-filmings rather than penetrations.
This mind is as apparent in Pabst as in Leni. This is the
mind that is not concerned with the material at all, but only
with the instruments. Pabst works over the surfaces of his
films, along the edges. Never does he look into an object,
as does a Jean Epstein. i It is significant that the word,
photogenic, is French in origin and not German. When
Jean Epstein sketches and moves up and down a line or an
object, I recognise the intention as speculative, even though

^ (Mr. Potamkin makes so definite a statement that we feel impelled
to intrude on his space to point out that his Never is in relation
to Mr. Potamkin's perception of Pabst; a point of view, in short,
which differs fundamentally from our own — that of Pabst's major
virtues, the gift of penetration and exploration is among the first to
be apprehended. His intuitive and psychic awareness is self-evident
and helped to expression by a technique whose fault would lie perhaps
in super consciousness rather than in the irrelevance and non-asser-

tiveness that are " the artisan's experiment " This, too,

remains a point of view. Ed.)

•392

I'ljoto: Hans Casparius

A new film by Erno Metzner. Where's Love, There's Danger (Ach-
tung, Lieve-Lebensgefahr). Grace Chiang Metzner and Nien Son

Ling.

Photo: Hans Casparius
Mr. Bob Stoll and Mrs. Schlichter in Erno Metzner's film.

Photos: Hans Caspar ius

Photo: Ufa

A street accident in The Girl in the Moon. Margaret Kupfer and
Gustl Stark-Gstettenbaur.

Photo: Ufa

The old professor saved from starvation. Klaus Pohl (Professor
Manfeldt) in The Girl in the Moon.

Photo: Ufa

Suffocation in the Rocket journeying to the Moon. Gustav von
Wangenheim (Windegger), Willy Fritsch (Wolf Helius) and below
the Professor (Klaus Pohl). Fritz Lang's new superfilm for Ufa.
The Girl in the Moon.

Photo: Ufa

A Lunar landscape. Reminiscent of the Icelandic solfaturas are
these spitting Lakes, wonderfully constructed for The Girl in the

Moon.

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the result is sometimes only tentative. That is the philoso-
phically experimental. When Pabst uses his camera
non-assertively, I see no such relevant intention, it is
something apart — and what is apart in a film purporting to
reveal a human adventure, is unscrupulous. That is the
artisan's experiment.

This same unscrupulousness is present in Ernst Lubitsch,
in Paul Leni, in Fritz Lang. Lubitsch with his pictorial
repartee " (high-school sophomore brand) and his " touches "
(see also von Stroheim " the master " and Charlie Chaplin
of A Woman of Paris)iy Leni with his decorator's camera-
play and smart-boy comics, Lang with his big-scale insipid
architecture : the same concern with trivia. The wastes of
able craftsmanship in Berger's The Burning Heart, in Kurt
Bernhardt's Die Fran nach der man sich sehnt: what is the
cumulative intention here?

The German film pretends to tragedy and that accentuates
the falsity. Instances are Dupont's Variety^ and the
numerous moral films of Germany, such as The Woman's
Crusade (Must She Go On?) The German penchant for
the moral further burdens the pretension. The effect is
generally ludicrous, as in the Ucicky film dealing with
sterilization, the many " flaming youth " pictures . . . The
law of art has not here been understood or even, I fear,
suspected : the conversion of the material, which includes the
moral idea. Never is the moral intention as offensive as it is
in the French film, of a L'Herbier or a Benoit-Levy, for in

^ I am not now referring to the important contribution of the Chaplin
film, but to its g'ratuitous intelligence.

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the German film we sense the honesty of that intention,
whereas it is only an etiquette of decorative sentimentality in
the French film. But the Germans have never learned to
embody the moral idea in the unfolding motion picture, as
have the Swedes of the great Swedish film period.

Yet in this affection for the moral I find a hope for the
German film, once it learns to wed the moral intention with
its first victory, the simple theme of general reference (The
Last Laugh, The Street, etc.) The success is just beginning
to expose itself in the stories of children and young folk.
The films of children are as yet superior to those dealing
with young folk, simply because the problem of the latter is
more ponderous. But the fact that the Germans, of all
people, care for their children en masse promises genuine
films of the lives of the children. Max Mack's Der Kampf
der Tertia is an excellent indication, and the sensitivity of
Hans Behrendt's The Robber Band is another indicator of
hope. The American films of children are most wretched,
from Our Gang to The Innocents of Paris, Childhood is
made egregious in them. The French film of children is
usually the film of a child and the reference is seldom far-
extending (Poil de Carotte, Gribiche), Moreover, the
French have little sense of the child as child. The Germans,
I think, have shown they are best fit to deal with childhood.
The group-mind of the German comprehends the child as
group-individual and this is fortunate for both the verity of
the performance and its cinematic effectiveness, as well as
for the child participating (but this is a matter beyond this
essay).

There have been accumulating in the German kino for
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years local, domestic films of Berlin low-life (Liedtke in
W ochenendezauher and Kampers in Lemkes sel. Witwe)
which should long ago have provided the folk-basis for a
great German film comedy. But only recently have we been
favoured with the first instance of this awaited comedy, in the
film rendering by Hans Behrendt of Carl Sternheim's Die
Hose, with its blend of grand burlesque and satire, its
infusion of the extraordinary — in the person of the court
poet — into the ordinary — gloriously done by Werner Krauss.
The film made from Hauptmann's The Beaver Coat might
have been another transcendent comedy, had its director
understood the law of the conversion of material, with its
two divisions : the retention of the essential narrative and
the creation of cinematic correlatives in the performance.
Hans Behrendt has understood these two demands
adequately.

Two promises remain with the German film. First, the
rise of new directors, with the hope that the studio-mind will
be modified or new uses will be found for it. Second, the
maturity of the German actor. The latter has been constant
amid the fluctuations, even non-development, of the German
kino. Werner Krauss, Fritz Kortner, Heinrich George,
Hans Schlettow, Bernard Goetzke, Wolfgang Zilzer — Asta
Nielsen, Grete IMosheim, Henny Porten, numerous others
whose names escape me for the moment, performers who fuse
with the cinema. The performance of a Grete Mosheim as
a backfisch reveals what intelligence and talent might do
for Clara Bow. These German actors have kept the German
film from perishing in the hands of the artisan. If there has
been anv fault to find with these artists it is that they have

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been too submissive to the director, although frequently I
have felt Werner Krauss setting the pace for his regisseiir.
It is very likely that the German actor will elucidate for the
director his legitimate art, by clarifying for him the nature
of cinema performance. The German director has been,
like the German schoolmaster of the past, the sort of
disciplinarian who believes in getting the most out of his
pupil. He demanded Mehr, mehr ! So that very often the
actor became apoplectic. Jannings and Veidt are typical
instances. Fortunately, in The Last Laugh the co-ordination
and convergence of the environment upon Jannings served as
a rein and Jannings was brought back into the film and a
powerful unity was preserved.

In this consideration, I mentioned at several points the
bluntness of German presentations as revealed in their
moralizations, in their fantasies, etc. I assemble these
evidences of bluntness under the general head of simplism.
It is a term I have used many times in these pages, and
which, I believe, my readers will understand by connotation.
If we take the fantasy of Caligari and compare it with that of
Die Hose we will note the difference in the categories.
CaligarVs narration contains no intricacy, no larger reference
. . . it is Peer Gynt without the philosophy and the poetry
of the Ibsen drama. Am I stretching my comparison ?
Certainly, deliberately. I wish to indicate where the
Germans have gone for their experience of the fantastic. To
Torgiis. These fantastic narratives — these fantastic films,
ended with themselves. Epstein's The Fall of the House of
Usher rises to a sense of universe-torment. Stiller's The
Treasure of Arne was the poignancy of the primitive. Yet

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The Treasure of Arne was a very simple film, its intricacies
were in its transcendental references, in its experience. i

In Die Hose we find a very simple narrative, but the
references save the film from the simplism which is the tale
only and nothing more. The secret lies in the unconcern
of the German directors for the experience of the unit, the
theme and its references. Again we may compare with The
Treasure of Arne a German film, made from Sudermann*s
The Cat's Bridge, All the appearances of tragedy but no
tragedy in this latter film. Or the film made from another
Sudermann, Dame Care. What is the meaning of these
films? What do they intend? That they intend no
peculiar experience is evident in their impurity. The film
is constantly blemished by parts of the narrative that have
no place in it. If the film cannot rise above its source, it
certainly can fall below it. An instance of this decline is
the Zelnik cinematization of Hauptmann's The Weavers.
Captions alone cannot make a film universal. What did
Zelnik intend here? What was his social apprehension of
the theme, and what form should this apprehension take in
the film ? There is no evidence that he asked himself these
questions. This was another film-job.

The German film-directors who have gone to America have

^ Further studies in simplism German-style are : The Three Wax-
Figures, Warning Shadows, Secrets of a Soul, and The Man with the
Tree-Frog. I especially include the other as an evidence of German
bluntness. Here is a mystery-play where the mystery is not introduced
until the film is well-nigh ended, and immediately solved. In other
words, here is a mystery-play without a mystery. Which is mystery
enough, I suppose. Murnau's Tartuffe is an instance of a great idea
gone stodgy because of simplism.

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brought with them this job-mind. That is why they have
not found Hollywood detrimental. The job-mind is
adaptive. Not so with the Swedish directors. Their minds
are experience-minds. The level between the work of a
Sjostrom or a Stiller in Sweden and his work in Hollywood
tells the story Tm after. I regret the presence of a Lubitsch
in Hollvwood. His sophistication was not our need. The
job-mind onlv abets the American job-mind. Leni mav have
interested some American directors in objects, but that is
enough : he interested them only in the movements of objects,
not in their qualitv. The Americans know enough about
literal movements, thev need to learn analysis for qualitv.
Murnau might have taught our directors some necessarv
things. \^idor might have learned something from him in
the way of ordered rhythms. But what the Fox Pictures
seems to have learned from the Germans is only the rising
mist of the atmospheric photography. The presence of an
Emil Jannings has, I believe, helped toward emphasizing, if
only a ver^' little, tlie right of the mature actor, a Jean
Hersholt for instance. Handsomeness is no longer the only
criterion. We have not vet, in America, attained to a wish
beyond the one-tA'pe performer, the caricature. It is signifi-
cant that we have imported no Werner Krauss and no Fritz
Kortner. But that is an American story.

Harry A. Potamkix.

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FREUD ON THE FILMS

Far away back in April (1929) Close Up welcomed
Metzner's UberfaJl, and described it as a beautiful flow
of images without break or jerk, catching the essence
of Freudian nightmare/' Later, L. Saalschutz, in a most
interesting article, discussed the film in its relation to the
unconscious. There remains Germaine Dulac's The Sea-
Shell and the Clergyman.

When Mr. Stuart Davis, the enterprising, had it brought
hopefully to London, we hastened to investigate.

Now that so man}' stage plays are being screened it was
good to see a psychoanalytical exposition of thought, for the
stage cannot show the layers upon layers of simultaneous
consciousness. The stage cannot acquire the mobility of
the subconscious, or put over as effectively the utter
grotesqueness, so essential to dream states, which trick
photography can capture on the screen. Piscator, and
others, have tried by splitting the proscenium into
sections, but the results have always been ponderous, they
lack this flow, this ebb, this rhythm of the cinema.

Germaine Dulac's picture begins with a door, a high and
narrow slit of a door, casting a shaft of light on to the floor
of blackness. Here is the same lesson that I found in The

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Eleventh Year (Close Up, Vol. 5. No. 2.), that light is
creating, that light is doing something on the screen. All
put, in cinematic terms, very neatly. See, there is a square
door and a round pool of light. How you have to watch for
the little things in this kind of picture I There are no laws
in this fourth dimension, just light doing things. Square
door, round pool.

The clergyman sits at a table pouring liquid, from a shell,
into a series of retorts, w^hich, after he has filled, he throws
to the ground. Symbolism, obvious.

Smoke flows over the fragments of the glass.

A man appears in the cell, he comes through a gaping
door; an intruder wearing a uniform, standing for Authority.
He arrests the cleric in his monotonous actions. The setting
of the cell makes it clear that these are the things the clergy-
man has shut away in his mind, and Authority, or Public
Opinion, forbids him to dwell on them. The unfortunate
falls to the floor. He creeps about feehng so much less than
the others, he has his vow^ of celibacy.

Startling change form the studio set, he is crawling down
a real street. In his life, as distinct from his suppressed
desires, he feels inferior.

Houses are placed over one another by quick mixes.

The groveller notices Authority driving, in a cab, with a
woman. It infuriates the clergyman to think that this man
may have, lawfully, that which is denied to him by his vows.
He chases the couple, and tracks them down in a church.
In slow motion, the movement of a dream state, he
approaches. This is his territory, the church.

Always the woman's face is shown as a chocolate-box type.

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She gazes on vaguely while the clergyman strangles her
partner.

A close up shows the face of the attacked. Threads of
blood trickle dow^n the nose ; threads that become wires to
pull the face into two parts. Nightmare. Poetical waters
of horror fill the screen. The clergyman is revealed with the
other floating in his arms. (Under the water sensation).

A great quarry. The clergyman on the skyline. His old
enemy appears at his side, frenzied he hurls him to de-
struction in the waters beneath.

The water motif over, space is bridged with the rapidity
of the unconscious. Back in the church the clergyman tears
the clothing from the woman's breasts. Shells appear to
cover her breasts.

Men and women dance crazily in a room ; the candelabra
spins madly. Authority and the woman enter and mount a
throne. Materializing from space the clergyman, who is
holding a shell in his hand, watches the dancers embracing.
Hurling the shell to the floor he sees it explode in smoke.

The tails of the clergyman's frock grow into flowing
trains : his rank, his vows.

Down corridors, and by a stream he pursues the woman.
The woman turns and jeers. She puts out her tongue.

Lights in a crystal globe remind of lights in the retorts.
He beckons to the woman to come and look in the globe, she
refuses. Symbolism, obvious.

He has a key in his hand. He swings the key in a com-
plicated figure. Opening door after door he finds the rooms
empty.

At rest in a hammock, while Authority sits in a warehouse.

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the clergyman yet manages to watch the woman materia-
lizing from the sky. There are no laws of time and space.
Now the clergyman feels that he could kill the capricious
woman. Between his hands models of houses and castles
are superimposed : symbols of his burning wishes for
domestic happiness. Follows pure imagery. Ships, with
beautiful sails, float on a sea so still that only the imagina-
tion could see it. Silver curtains, ships.

Maids clean the floor. Starting a new phase. The crystal
stands in the room. Men enter. The clergyman is married
to the woman by Authority dressed as a parson. Castles,
houses, boats, and silver nets. The crystal grows larger,
crashes to the floor. In the wreckage the face of Authority.

The scenario was written by Antonin Artaud. If one
could do it justice in mere words it would not be such a good
film.

OSWELL BlAKESTON.

MAKING A FILM OF THE ACTUAL

A Problem in Film Construction.

(Reprinted from The Clarion).

The editor asks me to say something about a film I com-
pleted two or three months ago. It is not for a producer to

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talk too solidly about his own work, so I shall tell vou about
the job itself rather than the result. The film will be going
its own rounds presently, and whoever of you wander down
the back streets may judge for themselves. They will, I
hope, find it among the westerns and the other proletarians.
There it belongs.

It is about the sea and about fishermen, and there is not
a Piccadilly actor in the piece. The men do their own acting,
and the sea does its — and if the result does not bear out the
107th Psalm, it is my fauk. Men at their labour are the
salt of the earth ; the sea is a bigger actor than Jannings or
Nitikin or any of them ; and if you can tell me a storv more
plainly dramatic than the gathering of the ships for
the herring season, the going out, the shooting at evening,
the long drift in the night, the hauling of nets by infinite
agony of shoulder muscle in the teeth of a storm, the drive
home against a head sea, and (for finale) the frenzy of a
market in which said agonies are sold at ten shillings
a thousand, and iced, salted and barrelled for an unwitting
world — if you can tell me a story with a better crescendo in
energies, images, atmospherics and all that make up the sum
and substance of cinema, I promise you I shall make a film
of it when I can.

First Essentials .

But, of course, making a film is not just the simple matter
of feeling the size of the material. If that were so every fool
who fusses over a nondescript sunset or bares his solar
plexus to the salt sea waves on his summer holiday, would be
an artist. I do not claim the brave word, though I would

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like to, but I think I know what it mostly means. It has
very little to do with nondescript enthusiasm, and a great
deal to do with a job of work.

In art, as in everything else, the gods are with the big
battalions. You march on vour subject with a whole regi-
ment of energies : you surround it, you break in here, break
in there, and let loose all the shell and shrapnel you can
(by infinite pushing of your inadequate noddle) lay hands
on. Out of the labour something comes. All you have to
do then is to seize what you want. If you have really and
truly got inside, you will have plenty — of whatever it is —
to choose from.

So in this rather solid adventure of the herring fishery
I did what I could to get inside the subject. I had spent
a year or two of my life wandering about on the deep sea
fishing boats, and that was an initial advantage. I knew
what they felt like. Among other things they had developed
in me a certain superior horsemanship which was proof
against all bronco-buckings, side-steppings and rollings
whatsoever. I mention this because the limiting factor in
all sea films is the stomach of the director and his camera-
men. It is a super fact, beyond all art and non-art. Of my
cameramen one also was an ex-seaman. The other, for all
his bravery, was mostly unconscious.

In this matter I was altogether to blame. What I know
of cinema I have learned partly from the Russians, partly
from the American westerns, and partly from Flaherty, of
Xanook. The westerns give you some notion of the
energies. The Russians give you the energies and the

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intimacies both. And Flaherty is a poet. The net effect
of this cinematic upbringing was to make me want a storm :
a real storm, an intimate storm, and if possible a rather noble
storm. I waited in Lowestoft for weeks till the gale signal
went up, and I got it. So did the cameramen. The wild
Arabian breeze of a drifter's bilges did not help matters.

The Energies,

Taking the film as a whole I got the essentials of what
I wanted. I got the most beautiful fishing village in the
world — I found it in the Shetlands — for a starting point. I
staged my march to the sea, the preparations, the proces-
sion out. I ran in detail of furnace and engine-room for
image of force, and seas over a headland for image of the
open. I took the ships out and cast the nets in detail. As
to the rope over the cradle, the boy below, the men on deck
against the sea; as to the rhythm of the heaving, the run
on the rollers, the knotted haul of each float and net ; as
to the day and approaching night ; as to the monotony of
long labour. Two miles of nets to a ship : I threw them in
a flood of repetition against a darkening sky.

The life of Natural cinema is in this massing of detail,
in this massing of all the rhythmic energies that contribute
to the blazing fact of the matter. Men and the energies
of men, things and the functions of things, horizons and
the poetics of horizons : these are the essential materials.
And one must never grow so drunk with the energies and
the functions to forget the poetics.

I had prepared against that as best I knew how. Image
for this, image for that. For the settling of darkness, not

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darkness itself, but flocks of birds silhouetted against the
skv flying hard into the camera : repeated and repeated.
For the long drift in the night, not the ship, not the sea
itself, but the dark mystery of the underwater. I made
the night scene a sequence of rushing shoals and contort-
ing congers. For the dawn, not a bleary fuss against the
sky (which in cinema is nothing), but a winding slow-
rolling movement into the light. Then a bell-buoy. Then
a Dutch lugger rolling heavily into the light. Three images
in a row.

You can never have your images too great, and I think
there are none of us poets enough to make cinema properlv.
It is in the end a question of suggesting things and all the
example of Shakespearian metaphor is there to tell vou how
short we stand of the profundities.

The most solid scene, I would say, was the spectacle of
the hauling. Camera and cameraman were lashed on top
of the wheelhouse, and the nets came up through the heavy
sea in great drifts of silver. We got at it from every angle
we could and shot it inside out with the hand camera; and,
put together, it made a brave enough show. But even
then the fact of the matter, however detailed, however
orchestrated, was not enough. The sea might lash over
the men and the ship plunge, and the haul of the nets
tauten and tear at the wrists of the men : it was still not
enough. This business of horizons had to be faced over
again. By fortune a whale came alongside to clean the nets,
and I used it for more than a whale. I used it for a ponderous
symbol of all that tumbled and laboured on that wild
morning. It adds something, but it is possible that some-

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thing else, had I but felt it properly, would have carried
the scene still further to that horizon I speak of. Images,
images — details and aspects of things that lift a world of
fact to beauty and bravery — no doubt half a hundred passed
under my nose, and I did not see them.

Processions and Images.

So through the procession into harbour, and the scenes
in the market place at Yarmouth — fact joined to fact and
detail to detail. But here, of course, because of the size
and variety of the scene, rather greater possibilities in the
matter of orchestration. The gathering procession of
buyers and sellers on the quaj'side, the procession of ships
through the harbour mouth : the two processions inter-
woven. The selling itself, the unloading the carrying :
mouth work and shoulder work interwoven, made comple-
mentary to each other, opposed to each other as your fancy
takes you. Rivers of fish, being slid into a ship's hold,
cartfuls of baskets, girls gutting, barrels being rolled : all
the complex detail of porterage and export dissolved into
each other, run one on top of the other, to set them marching.
It is the procession of results. Cranes and ships and railway
trains — or their impressionistic equivalents — complete it.

The problem of images does not arise so plainly here,
for cinematic processions, if you bring them off, are solid
affairs that carry their own banners. Two, however, I did
try. As the labour of the sea turned to the labour of the
land, I carried forward a wave theme. It is played heai^ilv
for accompaniment as the ships ride in ; but as life on the

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quayside takes charge of the picture, it is diminished in
strength till it vanishes altogether. Through breaking
waves the buyers and sellers go to their business. Count
that, if you will, for an image of opposition. It is a far crv
from the simple and solid labour of the sea to the nep-man
haggling of the market place.

The last was of a similar type. As the catch was being
boxed and barrelled I thought I would like to say that
what was really being boxed and barrelled was the labour
of men. So as the herring were shovelled in, and the ice,
laid on, and the hammer raised to complete the job, I slid
back for a flash or two to the storm and the hauling. The
hammer is raised on mere fish : it comes down on dripping
oilskins and a tumbling sea. This notion I kept repeating
in flashes through the procession of barrels and the final
procession of railway trucks. The barrels of the dead pass
for a second into the living swirl of a herring shoal, in and
out again ; the smoke in a tunnel dissolves for a moment
into the tautened wrist of a fisherman at the net-rope.

I cannot tell you what the result of it all is. Notions
are notions and pictures are pictures, and no knowledge of
cinematic anatomy can guarantee that extra something
which is the breath of life to a picture. If I raise this
matter of images it is rather to give you some idea of how
the movie mind works. It has to feel its way through the
appearances of things, choosing, discarding and choosing
again, seeking always those more significant appearances
which are like yeast to the plain dough of the context.
Sometimes they are there for the taking ; as often as not
you have to make a journey into a far country to find them.

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That, however, is no more difficult for cinema than for
poetry. The camera is by instinct, if not by training,
a wanderer.

John Grierson.

(]\Ir. Grierson's film, Drifters — a New Era production —
will be shown together with Potemkin at the first performance
of the Film Society in London, on November 10th. Ed,)

LOSS AND PROFIT

Back of many a big Hollywood success lies a record of
prodigious failures. Partly these failures may be due to
circumstance, but chiefly they are the result of that naive
incompetence which is one of Hollywood's astonishing
charms. It is never a cause of any serious worry. Whatever
troubles, setbacks, disappointments or financial losses it
may involve, Hollywood always presents a smiling face to
the world. And well it may, for it has learned the secret
of making the world pay for its mistakes.

Let a picture cost five times more than it reasonably
should have cost, and Hollywood, instead of bewailing the
waste of time and money, optimistically turns it to account
by putting the picture on the market as a super-
production." Its tremendous cost is frankly blazoned on

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the billboards. And the world, instinctively assuming that
a picture which involved an outlay of two million dollars
must necessarily be better than one made for a beggarly
four hundred thousand, responds with proportionately
increased patronage.

Hollywood is a past master of human psychology. Hence
its unfailing optimism. It has created the only business
in the history of man wherein failure, blunder, incompe-
tence, and inefficiency are transmutable into assets.

Any number of outstanding pictures whose costs have
averaged over a million dollars each", might be cited
in illustration of the success of this pragmatic optimism.
Ben-HuTy perhaps, is as interesting an example as any. At
all events, it is one of the most striking, in that it continues
to hold the record for expensiveness of production.

In the first place, a small fortune in cash was paid for the
picture rights to this great story of Lew Wallace's, in
addition to a royalty contract calling for fifty per cent, of
the revenues from the film. And this for the chief purpose
of putting the famous chariot race on the screen. The rest
of the story was regarded merely as so much ballast.

For some reason never yet explained, a large company of
players, writers, technicians, cameramen and assistants,
together with a vast amount of impedimenta, was dispatched
to Rome to film the picture. After a year's work there,
characterized chiefly by delays, obstacles, and misunder-
standings, and during which the original director and
scenario writer, as well as several of the leading players,
were replaced and ordered home, the entire outfit was

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brought back to Hollywood (that is, Culver City, to be
specific).

The chief purpose of this expensive trip to Rome had
been to film the chariot race in the great circus described
in the novel. The reason for returning without having
accomplished this purpose may have been the discovery on
somebody's part that this circus was located in Antioch.
Perhaps the oversight had been due to the fact that the
civilized world in the time of Christ was commonly referred
to as Rome, and as Hollywood producers are too busy
creating history themselves to be mindful of the work
of others in this field, they may innocently have assumed that
the scenes of Ben-Hur were laid in the only Rome with
which they were acquainted.

At any rate, that is where they at first thought it proper to
film the picture, notwithstanding that no single incident in
the story is laid in the city of Rome. By the time they
changed their minds and brought the company back, a cost
of two or three millions had been charged against the
picture, with little or nothing to show for it. The greater
part of the Roman film was discarded, and the piece de
resistance of the picture, the Antioch circus, was built in
Culver City at a cost of two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars, and the great chariot race put on there, with seventy-
five thousand citizens of Los Angeles playing the part of
holiday onlookers, each being provided gratis with
appropriate costume and make-up. And this having been
successfully accomplished on home territory, the picture was
subsequently completed in and around the studio.

Four million dollars is the advertised cost of Ben-Hur.

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With proper preparation, foresight, and knowledge it
might easily have been made for less than one-fourth that
sum. As a picture it lacks any of the elements of greatness.
Its one redeeming feature is the spectacle of the race, which
is undeniably a masterpiece of cinematic craft. And this,
together with a clever exploiting of the stupendous cost of
the picture, has ''put over " the film and made it a success.

Why, then, be critical of Hollyw^ood extravagance? On
the contrary, its exploitation as a means of turning a deficit
into an asset — of raising a mediocre picture to the rank of
a superlative production — cannot but challenge our wonder-
ment and admiration, if not our envy.

As already stated, Ben-Hur is not an exceptional case,
save for the actual amount of extravagance and incompetence
involved. Cinema history abounds in these examples of
waste and prefatory failures in the filming of eventually
successful pictures.

Nor have the talkies, despite their inherent demand for
more careful preparation, brought about any appreciable
modification of this basic characteristic condition. Some-
time next year the world will be regaled w^th a colourful
musical production, under the probable title of The King of
Jazz. It will be built about Paul Whiteman and his famous
jazz orchestra. According to schedule, it should have been
completed by this time. As a matter of fact, it has not yet
started and has already cost its producers, the Universal
Company, not less than three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars.

The terms of Universalis contract with Whiteman offer
an interesting example of the extent to which producers will

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financially obligate themselves in their desire to secure a
popular feature for film production. In the present instance
these terms include a cash payment to Whiteman of
fifty thousand dollars upon the signing of the contract ;
another fifty thousand upon his arrival at the studio ; still
another fifty thousand upon the completion of the picture ;
and yet another fifty thousand on the day of the picture's
release. Also, a salary of five thousand dollars a week
during the two months he was scheduled to be at the studio,
with a supplemental eight thousand a w^eek for his men.
And as a further recognition of his value as a public attrac-
tion, the contract stipulates that he is to receive forty per
cent, of the picture's profits, in addition to the various cash
payments already recited.

The contract was signed last November, and in prepara-
tion for the making of the picture, which the contract
stipulated should begin on the 21st of June, Universal spent
much ready cash. This included a big price to two authors for
a collaborated story to fit the already selected title, The King
of JazZy and an expenditure of ninety thousand dollars for
the building of a vast futuristic set called for by the scenario
— a set, which, like many another before it, is said to be the
largest ever constructed on a studio stage. Besides, as a
matter of gratuity and a show of good will, the company
prepared a sound-proof bungalow for Mr. Whiteman's
personal accommodation, in which as part of its elaborate
equipment were installed a special cooling system and a five-
thousand-dollar grand piano. Also, a special lodge was
built on the studio lot for the accommodation of the orchestra
members.

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When Mr. Whiteman arrived at the studio— incidentally
receiving fifty thousand dollars for so doing— he glanced
over the scenario that had been prepared for him, and
promptly rejected it— a right accorded him under the
contract. In a feverish effort to please the jazz maestro,
the best Hollywood story talent was called in and ordered
forthwith to write something that would fit Mr. Whiteman,
as well as the ninety-thousand-dollar futuristic set and the
publicly announced title of The King of Jazz,

But all in vain. There was no satisfying Mr. Whiteman ;
and after gracing the lot for the time called for in the
contract, he and his men picked up their saxophones
and other weird instruments and hied them hence, with a
hundred and thirty thousand dollars in their collective
pockets as salary for doing nothing.

According to the present understanding, Mr. Whiteman
will return in November and look over the stories which will
be prepared for him in the meantime, and if any one of them
appeals to him as worthy, the making of the picture will
proceed from that date. And when it is released we mav
look for some superlative announcements in praise of it,
with special emphasis on the cost of this mammoth and peer-
less production.

Life in Hollywood is not all roses. Much there is
of thorny trouble and worriment which the finished picture
never reveals. The public must be served, and the producers
are never unmindful of their duty on this score, whatever
the cost. That a little more system, a little more thought
and calculation, a little more intelligence might obviate
many of their worries and expenses, is neither here nor there.

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Hollywood is as it is. With its perennial optimism and its
skill in converting losses into profits, it needs neither our
sympathy nor criticism.

Clifford Howard.

FINDS

If " seeing's believing it is easy to imagine that every
scene which flashes or flickers across our line of vision at
the local cinema, has not necessarily been studied from the
point of view of balance by the Producer. Otherwise we
should have been spared a great deal of mental anguish.

On the other hand, considering this, it is astonishing how
from time to time, a perfectly lovely sequence is evolved in
a film, which in every other respect is unworthy of
exhibition.

These scenes, infrequent as they may be, are due
to nature rather than art, it usually must be admitted. In
the average woolly west drama the plot is negligible, the
acting hardly equivalent to that of a church amateur
dramatic society, and details of acting, make-up, etc., are
cheerfully ignored by all concerned. If it is your hard lot,
therefore, to have to sit through one of these efforts, it is
generally possible to learn a useful lesson from the scenery
of the " great, open spaces ".

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Perhaps the scene is a rocky pass, barren of vegetation
and having only a couple of men or horses in the fore-
ground. Uncompromising? Very. But there are sermons
in stones and you will probably find that the jagged outlines
of the rocks make an ideal background for the flowing, easy
movements of the horses. The contrast in forms un-
consciously serves to feed the mind's eye, apart from any
action which may be taking place in connection with the
plot, and is strangely reminiscent of modern interior designs
used in some German films, which have taken a good deal
of thought for their rhythmic design.

Another instance can be found in a typical slap-
stick comedy. Here there has obviously been no attempt
at creating a well balanced picture. The object of the film
is amusement of a particularly unsubtle type. Yet once
again — Good in Everything." Observe the wreckage of
the room round which the fat man has been chased by the
little man with that funny moustache. Curtains torn from
their hangings fall in folds which would have delighted an
old master. The wreckage of the dresser and china forms
a heap which would, in all probability prove an inspiration
to a Russian poster designer. The abandon of the attitude
of the fat man who has now been stunned by the
chandelier falling on his head, is a study in unforced and
easy lines which contrasts pleasantly with the stilted " art "
interior in which the action has been staged.

Or, if you are compelled to suffer in silence through the
seven reels of a soul-stirring drama which has obviously
been produced in a hurry and with an eye to economy, in-
stead of fuming and fretting, devote your attention ta

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admiring the shadows which fall away from the amazing
moon-lit spot in which the action is taking place. More
often than not, you will find their soothing lines a relief
from the exaggerated poses of the players.

If the scene is taking place in a haunted house, forgers'
den or fog-bound docks — these things always happen
at night — there is usually the unaffected and unpremeditated
beauty of those shadows, for the action is sure to be en-
livened and emphasized by a lantern or street light glowing
through the gloom.

By watching for these little acts of grace it is possible to
extract a certain amount of — well — interest, even from the
worst of films, and there is rather a thrill in appreciating
something which probably no one else in the theatre has
discovered.

Perhaps, however, you can go to a cinema which does
not show that kind of film, in which case, you will have been
spared the agony of sitting through an indifferent pro-
gramme filler for the sake of watching a really good " big "
picture. All the same, you will have missed my thrill of
discovery.

D. L. H.

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"THIS MONTAGE BUSINESS"

The Film Guild of London, an amateur organisation, is
suffering from a bad attack of this montage business
The phrase in quotes is not mine ; one of the members of
the Guild aptly but thoughlessly employed it at their meeting-
last month when several recent productions of the Guild were
screened.

Chief among these was Waitress, produced on 9 mm. stock
by ^Ir. Orlton West. Waitress is a bad film, verv bad.
Originally it was made as a one-reeler, but after he had made
it ^Ir. West went to the Continent and saw the work of
Vertof. He was so impressed with Vertof's montage that
he came back, added another reel to his film, and endea-
voured to cut the whole production in the Vertoff manner.

Now cutting, or montage as some people prefer to call it,
is something more than clipping every possible shot to a
couple of frames. Cutting should be composed, and ]^Ir.
West has neither composed his film nor his cutting. The
result is a striving after effect purely. If the director had
paid a little more attention to his lighting and photography
(which were terribly poor), and to his story construction, and
less to stunts, Waitress might have been a better film. The
very long and almost unintelligible double exposure sequence
which attempts to express the mental collapse of the girl in

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the cafe could well have been dispensed with, or, at least,
shortened considerably.

This desperate endeavour to be clever in order to be
different also spoilt Fade Outy a first effort by ]Miss Xorah
Cutting. (The name is quite genuine, I believe I) This
short has possibilities, but again is almost ruined by this
montage business ". Its climax, when the man who is
helping an amateur company on location falls from the tree
and dies, is killed by a rapid succession of closely cut shots
which the mind positively refuses to follow. The weather
conditions under which the film was made were obviously
bad, and this should have been taken into consideration when
Fade Out was edited. If \^ertoff had been working under
similar conditions, he would never have attempted to
do what the director of Fade Out has done. Film Guilders,
please note I

In case I be misunderstood, let me say that the members
of the Film Guild are honestly endeavouring to do good
Avork, but they are afflicted with an attitude which can best
be described as posing. Everybody recognises the difficult
conditions under which the British amateurs have to work
to-day. But these difficulties cannot always be used as an
excuse for careless work. Carlessness is impermissible in
amateur production.

The Guild is certainlv working towards something, and
most of its work is experimental, but in doing so it is wasting
a terrible amount of time and energy. Gaiety of Nations, an
amateur film reviewed by me in Close Up last month took
over six months to make, and it was worth it. I am not
suggesting that every amateur film should take a similar

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length of time, but the lesson to be learned from Gaiety of
Nations is that adequate care, thought and attention must
be given to all amateur productions if the British amateur
film movement is to compete successfully with similar move-
ments on the Continent and in the U.S.A.

Hastily conceived and shoddily constructed work will only
bring discredit.

R. Bond.

VOIR ET ENTENDRE !

Le film sonore n'est plus un myst^re pour les cinephiles
genevois. L'Alhambra vient de projeter successivement Le
Chanteur de Jazz, L'Escadre Volante, La Paiva, Les
Noun)elles Vierges et La Divine Lady, avec diverses attrac-
tions sonores : concerts de jazz, extraits d'operas chantes par
Martinelli, duos d'instruments divers. Comme partout,
enthousiasme delirant du public pour Le Chanteur de Jazz
qui inaugurait a Geneve Tinvention de la Western Electric.
L'on applaudit a tout rompre et ce d'autant plus facilement
que le film s'applaudissait lui-meme avec une energie tout
americaine. Chacun ouvrit toutes grandes ses oreilles pour
saisir tout ce que pouvait bien chanter ce brave Jolson a sa
little Mammy, sur un air a la fois dechirant et irresistible.
Si le sens des paroles echappait a la majorite des spectateurs.

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aucun doute, cependant, n'etait possible quant aux sentiments
qui devaient agiter le chanteur de jazz. Deux tenors
chanterent, dans la meme soiree, un fragment des Pecheurs
de PerleSy de Bizet. On ne peut, en verite, rien imaginer
de plus ebouriffant ! Devant un decor de petit theatre de
province, deux hommes chantent, ma foi fort bien, en
gesticulant de grotesque facon. On pose la main sur son
coeur, on tend le bras droit vers I'horizon, on roule des yeux
furibonds . . . le spectateur gene par ces naives demonstra-
tions, ferme les yeux ou laisse tomber son regard sur une
photogenique voisine. Passons !

Le vrombissement des moteurs de L'Escadre Volante fut
une diversion qui enchanta tous ceux qui n'estiment pas
suffisant le vacarme des klaxons, des panatropes, des sirenes
d'usines et du haut-parleur de la concierge. Ramon Novarro
retint pourtant assez longtemps quelques spectatrices ; elles
endurerent patiemment le bourdonnement des avions pour
contempler leur cher Beji-Hur.

La Paiva est de Griffith; c'est deja plus rassurant et si
Ton veut etre impartial, il faut reconnaitre que la prise de
vues est tres bonne. Les melodies larmoyantes de Lupe
Velez emurent et plurent beaucoup, encore que I'amplification
deforme le son et provoque ici et la quelques vibrations
defectueuses de la voix.

Un titre scabreux comme Les Nouvelles Vierges ne pouvait
manquer d'attirer une foule de curieux. Voir et entendre,
c'est surement plus echauffant encore. On vit Joan Crawford,
Dorothy Sebastian et Anita Page, mais on ne les entendit
point. Et au nombre de ces nouvelles vierges, que de petits
cerveaux acquis a la morale la plus intransigeante. Our

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Dancing Daughters n'aurait pas du etre traduit de la sorte.

Enfin La Divine Ladjy avec Nelson et Lady Hamilton,
Varconi et Corinne Griffith. Passe encore Varconi qui donne
de Nelson une figure assez satisfaisante, mais qui aura
pourtant un oeil de trop pour incarner, sur le tard, le Baron
du Nil. Mais Corinne Griffith n'entre guere dans la peau de
son heroine. Corinne Griffith a trop souci de sa " respecta-
bihty " pour cela. Elle chante ici et la, comme par hasard,
joue de la harpe, se fait accompagner d'un pianiste qui tire de
son instrument ... 6 merveille de^harmonies de violoncelle !
Quand les matelots de Nelson, tres echauffes, poussent de
frenetiques hourras, Ton se represente assez bien ce que
doivent etre les ovations qui honorent, apres un match de
base-ball, les vainqueurs.

Nous n'avons eu encore que des Warner Brothers; que
seront les talkies anglais, allemands et francais, I'avenir nous
Tapprendra. Pour le moment du moins le film sonore n'a
pas acquis une forme reellement interessante. L'on s'etonne,
a bon droit, de n'entendre que chanter. Les textes subsistent
comme par le passe, et les quelques bruits que Ton s'est plu,
jusqu'ici, a inserer dans I'accompagnement musical, ne
parlent qu'a I'oreille.

Pour juger equitablement un film dit sonore, nous devons
encore degager I'image de la parole, du chant et des bruits.
Ce faisant nous constatons que la mise en scene est moins
soignee qu'auparavant, que le scenario est generalement peu
fouille . . . et que les scenes de plein-air ont presque totale-
ment disparu. Recul technique evident, done, du film muet
utilise comme instrument sonore. Quant aux sons, il nous
parait que ce fameux svnchronisme n'a pas toute Timportance

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qiron lui accorde. C'est la une affaire de mise au point, un
detail technique qui, une fois regie, ne subit aucune variation.
Personne, en conversant, ne s'inquiete du synchronism^ et
I'on ne prete attention qu'au sens et a la portee des mots.
Le synchronisme realise, I'instrument perfectionne, reste
Tutilisation. Et tout depend, ce me semble, de ce que Ton
veut montrer, faire entendre. La encore un eclectisme eclaire
est necessaire, la encore il faut savoir laisser de cote I'insig-
nifiant et se borner a ne reproduire que ce qui peut enrichir le
sujet visuel. On use actuellement du film sonore comme un
violoniste debutant use de son instrument : avant de se livrer
a I'etude du solfege, Ton s'essaye a en tirer les accents les
plus divers et les moins harmonieux. Ton gratte, Ton egratigne
les oreilles du voisin. Ton s'assure que les cordes rendent bien
un son different. Patience, Ton grattera bien encore quelque
temps, mais le diable serait qu'une harmonic ne finisse par
en sortir.

F. Che VALLEY.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

FILMS IX HISTORY.— Xo. 5.

Blind Husbands . A Von Stroheim Production.

Von Stroheim always has a good story to tell : Stroheim
is a good story.

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In his first picture, Blind Husbands, his cigarettes are not
so long and exotic, nor his uniforms as upholstered ; but
Stroheim's atmosphere of condescending to appear in the
flicks, his wonderfully kept-up Court-of-the-Emperor bearing,
proves itself an enduring receipt.

The public has to tire of seductions by moonlight, of
Stroheimesque seductions in orchards laden with blossoms
or in palatial chambers, before a Stroheim picture can be sent
to the destructor.

Scenes in the Tyrolean Alps are quite thrilling. We know,
more or less, what will happen ; that never w^as any argument
against a movie situation.

A pretty wife who is neglected by her noble, honourable,
(what do you know about that?) upright husband; an old
friend of the husband, with unshaven face, carved German
pipe, and a habit of spitting each time the scenario calls for
atmosphere; and Stroheim personally appearing in the
picture and personally directing it. Stroheim putting the
scent behind his ears, kicking a dog which gets in his way
(or perhaps not in this one), and watching a religious
demonstration. Then Stroheim, the w^ife, the husband, the
faithful friend, all on the mountain. And w^hat more could
you want ? or rather, w^hat more could Stroheim want ? Xot,
I hope, the titles about mountains, and men's souls, and the
purity under the beast's clothing.

In ten years' time the Shaftesbury Avenue Pavilion might
revive it again : the years will certainly add to its value as
history.

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

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TALKING STILLS.

Some people have been apt to set a little too much
importance on stills. They do, unquestionably, mean a lot.
From the stills of The Rose of Pu Chui one could get the
quality of the film, the Chinese way of fitting their
architecture, customs, and dress to their faces.

The danger is to forget the time progression, and to stress
the purely sculptural qualities.

Remember, at the beginning of Storm Over Asia, the
Mongolian ancient squatting in some slumberous form of a
primitive cart ? Superficially the old man seems to be
ornamental, an introduction of the people of the land after
the scenery. One could, quite profitably, analyse the
composition from this angle. One might find a rhythm of
planes in the lines of the draperies, culminating in the
wrinkles of the faces. Really though the important point,
the Pudovkin point, the building in time, is that a sequence
illustrating the joys of the chase has just closed. The calm
of the philosophic ancient is a visual comment on the active
excitements of the chase.

With talking pictures greater care must be exercised in
judging stills. Will, in future, all stills carry the words of
spoken dialogue written under the picture ? And when a
film has one of these sound-noise-dialogue-music scores of
Meisel, will a few bars of the music be added at the side?
At first glance it is not a bright future for stills which do not
give us movement or sound.

O. B.

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THE SCREEN FINDS ITS TONGUE.

BOOK REVIEW.

The Screen Finds Its Tongue. By Fitzhugh Green.
(Putman's. 10/6.)

And they multiply. Mr. Green's contribution is much
more of the novel than the other talkie text books. There
is a seesaw interest. Will the Warner Brothers make the
grade? Will they? They made The ]azz Singer.

Now that the Brothers Warner have taken the old place
of D. W. Griffiths it is interesting to see their photographs.

Who would have thought that Jack Warner, at the age of
fifteen, sang songs in Newcastle (Pennsylvania) for the
illustrated slides projected by one of the family? But, to
quote ]\Ir. Green, " Jack, though very young at the time,
was soon to prove the more temperamental, artistic one of
the four. He shared with Harry a sense of the drama : he
was a born shonnnan.^'

Need I add the italics are mine ?

O. B.

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CENSORSHIP.

Ivor Montague's pamphlet The Political Censorship of
Films " (Gollancz — One shilling) is a valuable and much
needed compilation of facts. In Britain, the Laws governing
the exhibition of uncensored films are so compHcated and so
manifestly unfair that the mere documentation of them will
serve to strengthen the demand for their revision.

The pitfalls in the path of anyone who seeks to give per-
formances of worth-while films which have not secured the
approval of the Board of Censors are almost without number.
Whereas a theatrical performance not licensed by the Lord
Chamberlain can be given privately w^ithout hindrance, an
uncensored film cannot be shown, even privately, in any
Cinema without the express sanction of the local licensing
authority, and such permission, especially in London, is
extraordinarily difficult to secure.

Incidentally, it is worth recalling that the London Film
Society, which has been instrumental in exhibiting a number
of productions which otherwise would probably never have
been shown at all, only secured permission to exist from the
London County Council bv a majority of six votes.

The Board of Censors, to whose decisions all the local
authorities adhere, is, on the surface, an unofficial bod)^,
appointed and supported by the Trade. But, as the author
of the pamphlet points out, the Board is distinctly susceptible
to the washes of the Government. Dawn was a case in point.
So was Mother; in the case of this film the President of the
Board of Censors expressed the view that while he had no
particular objection to its presentation, " He could not

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disguise from himself that his own view was not shared bv
many members of the population, nor by the Government
(How Potemkin received the perfectly illegal attention of the
Special Branch of Scotland Yard is well known).

For the individual who wishes to give public performances
of uncensored films, the only way out of the impasse, under
the existing Laws, is to obtain non-flam copies of the films,
and hire premises which do not hold a cinematograph license.
But his troubles w^ill not end there. If he wants to
accompany the films with music (as, of course, he will) he
must apply for a music license, which can be refused. In
this event he can give only one public performance ; additional
performances must be in private.

Xo sooner has our high-minded individual got over these
little snags than he comes up against the 1927 Quota Act,
which lays it down that if his performances are not entirely
private he must arrange to shew a certain proportion of
British films !

Enough has been written to indicate the monstrous and
crippling effects of the existing Laws. It is intolerable that
such conditions, conditions that apply to no other Art, should
prevail, but prevail they do, and Ivor ^Montague is justified
in suggesting that every loophole afforded by the Laws
should be exploited in order to demonstrate practically the
stupidity of the w^hole business.

R. Bond.

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" LUIS TREXKER ERZAHLT

\"erlag " Filmkiinstler und Filmkunst Berlin W 30.

(RM 0.80).

The first volume of a series of film-booklets has been
recently published by the editors of Filmkiinstler und
Filmkunst," Luis Trenker erzahlt is the title of it.

Luis Trenker, a German actor well known for his mountain
films tells us about the interesting expedition to the ice-sea
in the far north, where the Hom-Film Der Ruf des Nordens
was turned. It was not an easy task for all of them who took
part in the expedition : heavy storms, piercingly cold
temperatures, icebergs. But as reward the wonderful mid-
night sun of Spitzbergen, the beautiful and serene
atmosphere of the lonely ice-fields. Funny adventures too,
of course, for instance, the fight with a beautiful polar-bear,
who unfortunately always appeared in the moment when all
the cameras would not w^ork (a disaster well known to many
a cameraman in similar exciting situations).

But nearly all the members of the expedition were brave
and courageous and fulfilled their duty under the most
difficult circumstances in their curious studio 10 degrees from
the north-pole.

A short and well written sketch of the rather dramatic film
Der Ruf des Nordens, a story of two rivals who search for a
lost polar-expedition, and beautiful stills make up this cute
little booklet.

Trude Weiss.

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CORRESPONDENCE.

To the Editor of Close Up,

Sir,

I have just seen a very, almost unbelievably bad film, a
fact that in itself is not perhaps surprising, but there are
some points about this film which cause me much anxiety,
by which I am completely nonplussed. I ask leave for
space in your journal, therefore, in the hope that my mysti-
fication may be somew^hat enlightened by one of your many
readers.

The presentation of this very bad film was attended by
a large audience, composed of the gentlemen of the press and
those very important people, the exhibitors, who brought
their friends and their wives. Now during the unfolding
of this film, at times indicated by themselves, these persons
broke out into bursts of unstinted praise and admiration and
clapping and such things that indicate pleasure, instigated by
the scenes they were observing on the screen and the sounds
to which they w^ere listening.

I herewith would like to be made acquainted with
the secret of their enjoyment, so that I, too, may laugh and
clap and applaud. I feel that I am missing something
which is good, that is too subtle for my weak intelligence.
So I have gone to some trouble, (for I am interested in these
things) to tabulate my thoughts on this very bad film, so
that they can be compared with those of these other persons.

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The Theme,

A story, adapted from an Eden Philpotts novel set in the
days of the Napoleonic Wars ; a story of a pretty lady, a
curly-headed hero, a dark-haired villain, (there is no end
to't), and a money-borrowing father. There are prisoners,
sailors, soldiers, lots of villagers, a witch, a captain, etc.,
etc. A conventional story, with plenty of action, not
entirely without cinematic properties.

The Scenario.

There is no apparent scenario-organisation. No con-
tinuity; no balance of incident; no design; no construction.
The dialogue is without w4t, fire, imagination, or repartee.
Sentences trail off into third rate banalities worse than
Elephant and Castle. The scenarist is one who has been

at it " for years.

The Direction,

Straightforward in all senses. Old fashioned, probably
just post-war school. The Glorious Adventure was better.
Every shot taken from the same level. Incident considered
of more importance than individuals. No atmosphere, no
subtlety of presentation, all dramatic content approached
from the same point of view. Almost complete ignorance
of such methods of dramatic expression as camera angle,
panning, travelling shots, pictorial composition, movement
of players, etc., etc.

The Acting.

Negligible. Very bad make-ups and melodramatic
acting. The leading lady can act if necessary, for she has
been seen under other direction.

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The CamerawGrk,

Undistinguished. Interior lighting of the all-over variety;
exteriors poor, with no attention given to the wonderful
possible landscapes of Dartmoor. Some jerky panning in
one place, overlooked because of small mercies. Many
opportunities lost, such as the prison vaults, the prison
market. The cameraman says he photographed Ben
Hur

The Design,

Architecture on the whole good, but unrevealed by
narrow-minded direction. Little scope for imagination, but
where opportunities arise, they have been taken. The
costumes are appalling in every sense. The period offers
much scope, but it is to little avail. Practically no attention
is paid to the delightful hairdressing of the date. No feeling
of form or line or tone values.

Assemblage,

No regard given to length of shot or sequence. Time-
lapses between one sequence and another conveyed by black
screen. Complete loss of continuity and latent dramatic
content resulting. No use made of dissolves or mixes. No
variety of cutting. The whole disjointed and unpleasantly
uneven.

The Recording,

Quite good of its kind.

Conclusions,

One is left at a loss, for one does not mean to be unkind
to the people who made this film. One is only sorry for

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them that they ever started. It can only be said, that of the
resources of the cinema they know nothing. Of the use of
the film for dramatic expression of a fiction-story in order
to give entertainment, they are unaware. Either they have
never seen a film in their lives, which is unlikely, or they
are hopelessly incompetent. They obviously have no idea
of film psychology, camera angle, editing, cutting, pictorial
composition, symbolism, indirect suggestion, continuity,
style, form, etc., etc.

It is a pity, for it is things like this that get the film a bad
name in England. Particularly when it is made there.

* * *

I am, sir, still anxious to know why those persons
applauded, so, that I, too, can shout ]\Iore . . .

more . . . please, it's great .... the greatest ever . . . . "

Yours, etc., i
Average Filmgoer."

HOLLYWOOD NOTES.

Devil May Care is to be Ramon Novarro's first talking
picture. The story, which is laid in France during the
period of Napoleon's first exile, provides for the introduction
of a number of songs. All of these have been especially
written for the film and will be sung by Novarro, who is
credited with an excellent operatic voice. (Credit is right.

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The Pagan has shown up the great big overdraft. Ed.)
The picture is being directed by Sydney FrankHn for
M-G-M.

* * *

Berthold Viertel, as director, with a company of Fox
players headed by Paul Muni, and accompanied by movie-
tone equipment and technicians, recently repaired to France
to secure some scenes at the Chantilly race course for in-
corporation in Seven Faces. Upon their return to Hollywood
it was discovered that not sufficient shots had been taken.
Accordingly a duplicate of the race course was built on one
of the big studio lots and the necessary additional scenes
thus obtained. If it be asked why this was not done in the
first place and the expense of a trip abroad avoided, the
answer is simply, that that is the way Hollywood does
things.

* * *

' King Vidor's next picture for M-G-M will be Dulcy, This
is a wide departure from his Hallelujah; being a smart
comedy of social and political life. The featured player is

the mimetic comedienne, Marion Davies.

^ ^ ^

The Swan will be Lillian Gish's first appearance on the
talking screen. This Molnar play was selected for Miss
Gish onl)^ after an intensive search for a suitable vehicle for
her ; one offering a departure from her traditional type of roles
and at the same time providing a characterization in har-
mony with her distinctive personality. United Artists feel
that in the role of the princess in this drama the desired
object has been attained. The picture is being directed by

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Paul Stein, and the supporting cast includes Conrad Xagel,
Rod La Rocque, and ^larie Dressier.

^i^

Scarcely a month' passes that some company does
not announce the building of the largest set ever erected on
a motion-picture stage. The latest to claim this distinction
is Param.ount-Lasky. The palace garden set for their all-
color musical romance. The Vagabond King, is declared to
occupy 18,750 square feet, with a painted sky backing of
fifteen thousand square feet. The set requires three hundred

and ninety lights for its illumination.

As a rival to this Paramount-Lasky immensity, Warner
Brothers are announcing that their forthcoming mammoth
production, Show of Sho'ojs, is employing enough curtain
and drape material, consisting largely of velours and gold
and silver cloth, to cover four acres. By way of impressive
illustration, it is stated that if the bolts from which this
material was drawn had been placed end to end they would
cover a distance of over ten miles. Furthermore, allowing
three yards as the average amount of goods required for a
woman's dress, fifty-four thousand women could each have
one dress from the fabric used in the Shoii: of Shows, While
this has not the slightest bearing on the merit of the picture
as a picture, it offers an interesting and significant illustra-
tion of the artifices employed by Hollywood for enlisting the

attention and the interest of the public, in its productions.

* ^

Songs and theme music for Universal pictures are here-
after to be selected by vote of a special committee. This

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committee will consist of a representative of every depart-
ment of the giant studio, from the common labourer to the
highest executive. The committee will meet once a week,
to pass upon original songs and music submitted by the
general director of music, David Broekman. Because of its
diversified personnel, it is believed that this committee w^ill
fairly represent a cross section of the general public, and
that their selections will accordingly be in consonance with
popular taste.

The Hurdy Gurdy Man is William K. Howard's forth-
coming movietone picture for Fox. As a setting for this
production a complete Italian village, bordered by vineyards,
was constructed near Montrose, California. The picture is
starring George Jessel.

•* * *

United Artists are the latest producers to undertake
a musical extravaganza. The tremendous popularity of
M-G-M's Hollywood Revue and Fox's Movietone Follies
has inspired the undertaking of like ventures by all of the
big studios. Fanny Brice, the popular stage comedienne,
will have the leading part in United Artists' production,
which is starting on its way under the working title of The
Champa

* * *

7^/^ of Escape, a stirring adventure story of the
Malay nesian Islands, is under way by Warner Brothers.
Monte Blue has the leading role. Unlike his former picture
of this type — White Shadows in the South Seas — this film
is not being made against the actual backgrounds of the

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story, but on the Warner Brothers ranch near Hollywood.
Here, amid natural, resemblant scenery, a head-hunters'
village has been constructed, as well as a white settlement
typical of the tropical isles. Hollywood Hawaiians are

employed in the role of natives.

* * *

In Paramount-Lasky's Behind the Make-up, talkie en-
thusiasts throughout the world will be permitted to go on
the forbidden sound stages and see how talking pictures are
made. For the first time since the inauguration of talking
pictures, the operations carried on behind closed and guarded
doors will be made public. Devotees of the cinema will see the
warning red lights, the suspended microphones, the prop
boys and the electricians at work, the script girls, and the
directors giving their silent signals, with the camera men
encased in their sound-proof boxes. The story relates the
experiences of a young man seeking and eventually finding

a job in the Hollywood movies.

* * *

The Halperin Brothers, of Tech-Art Studios, are filming
a fantastic paleontological picture under the title of Creation.
The chief actors wull be the monster prehistoric reptiles —
brontosaurs, pterodactyls, triceratops, and their various un-
couth relatives. These creatures will not only be built life
size and made to move about, but will also be provided with
voices and such sounds and cries as imagination can devise
for them. The picture will resemble in general character the
film made from Conan Doyle's story. The Lost World,
which was produced several years ago and created no little
interest because of its novelty and ingenuity. C. H.

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NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF WORKERS' FILM

SOCIETIES.

In order to bring Russian and other vxorking-class films
to audiences that cannot afford Film Society fees, and
generally to arouse working-class interest in films of special
importance, it is proposed to form a number of "Workers'
Film Societies in industrial areas. A London society will
be the first to operate (first show November 17th), but cor-
respondents have been found in Birmingham, Manchester,
Bradford, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow, who are
prepared to form local societies on the same lines. People
in other towns are being approached.

Preparations for the supply of films, mainlv Russian, are
in hand, and no difficulty is anticipated in making up
programmes of useful films passed bv the Censor, even if
difficulties arise in connection with uncensored films.

In order to develop the scheme, a central office is necessary,
(the National Association), and a National Council. The
National Council will have very little work to do, as each
local society will have its own Committee ; but the Secretary
of the National Council will help in the formation of local
societies, arrange or suggest programmes, etc. As the
scheme develops, the central office will be financed by the
local societies ; but for the first six months a central fund
must be raised. Some has already been promised, and as
soon as a provisional council is formed a wider appeal can
be made.

Draft rules for the national association and for the local
societies are being worked out and will be circulated later.

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THE FILM GUILD OF LONDON : ALAIS AND
EXPERIMENTS.

The films we have shown are all the work of Members of
the Film Guild. Amateurs working under all sorts of
difficulties. Of Time — we all earn our livings 5J davs of
the week and try to snatch from the rest as much as we can to
experiment with films. Difficulties of Space — in the case of
Waitress, the interiors were done in a low basement of a cafe
" equipped " with four antique Klieg arc lamps, that
spluttered and extinguished at odd and unexpected intervals I
The editing, cutting and splicing of films done in odd rooms
of private houses (often under fire from the familv) have cost
hours of beauty sleep, but we think thev're worth it !

We regard our efforts purely as experiments — exercises in
the study of the most complex of all arts — the cinema. The
making of these productions has taught us very much
indeed, has developed individualities and discovered un-
expected talents in all branches, and weaknesses as well I
But now we are conscious of them and that's the way to
elimination.

Our efforts are now tending more in the direction of the
unacted non-theatrical film, for therein are no limitations of
persons, space or time. The film of actuality can be made
by a single person or bv the co-operated efforts of thousands.
And wherever the amateur has his cine-camera there will he
find the raw material for a film studv or an epic. And
THEREIN AVE ARE BEGINNING TO REALISE IS
THE FUTURE OF THE AMATEUR AS ARTIST.

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Neurasthenia, Sovkino. Culture Film. Professor
Suchareoski.

Men of the Wood, Sovkino. Document of an Expedition
to North West Siberia.
By a lucky chance and thanks to the courtesy of
the Sovkino agents in Berlin, I was able to see both these
films on the same morning. They afford an interesting
comparison because they show two utterly different ways of
living and because they are typical of the thoroughness in
which Russia is making films of every branch of scientific
investigation.

The first was made to show the causes and effect of
Neurasthenia and the necessity of having it cured as soon
as possible in the Soviet Institution for that purpose. Not
a very promising theme. But Professor Suchareoski has
made a most exciting film. I particularly liked the jagged-
cutting of the opening pictures of hectic traffic in Moscow,
and the chaotic life of an overcrowded office. The patient
is the head of some department. Incessant noise, incessant
cigarettes, drugs and patent medicines, but no sleep. You
begin to feel on edge yourself. Finally he comes to the
institute where after treatment of baths and dietetics he is
completely cured. When he is being examined we see
diagrams of sound and unsound reflex and . nerve actions.
They are all that a diagram should be, simple, explicit and
complete. Professor Suchareoski who told rae that he is
completely satisfied with the film has made a short film of
real distinction. He is a master of * Physiology without
tears.'

The Men of the Wood are a Mongol tribe, in number

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about a thousand, which was until a few months ago,
entirely unknown. The film is a document of their life.,
made by two young explorers, A. Litvinoff and C. Arsenjeff.

The photography is clear and the cutting shrewd, but not
sufficiently rapid. You can't really criticise a film like that.
Only after the six reels you feel that what you don't per-
sonally know^ about the tribe is not knowledge. The moun-
tains and woods, hunting and fishing are magnificent. The
fight with the bear is simply teriffic ; probably rather stark "
for an English audience, and the native dancers are suitably
mysterious. For a geographical or Ethnological society
the film is a godsend, and like all the Russian culture films, it
is easy to obtain, even in England.

Andrew Wordsworth.

Achtung, Liebe — Lebensgefahr {Where's Love There's
Danger) .

Erno ^letzner's new film for Mr. Bob Stoll of StoU-Film,
was shown to us in Berlin. Mr. Aletzner himself told us :
" I like to make such a film once, but not more than once."
It is a sensation film of motor racing, and those who have
seen Uberfall will be able to visualise the method by which
the thrill and terror of speed are conveyed to the spectator.
We would hint, how^ever, that to us the real sensation of
the film w^as Grace Chiang. Words would be inadequate to
describe the astonishing artistry of this new-comer to the
screen. Her manner has been likened to that of Lillian
Gish, and, indeed, it is possible to detect similiarities, not

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so much in method as in mannerism. One might say of
Miss Gish that her method is a Httle too mannerised — or
better still perhaps, her mannerism a Httle too methodical.
At least it is apt to be if you have seen her manv times.
There is a too deliberate whimsicality perhaps, a kind of
insistence on porcelain delicacy, some piece of Meissen,
with the eternal threat of porcelaint that it can be so easih
broken. Grace Chiang goes beyond this. She is less
capturable, less static. There is always a something behind
the something that you see. She is like blue smoke, and not
to be broken, as Miss Gish insists she is to be, but blown
away, and nobody would ever know quite where.

You feel she was not meant to steal the picture, but steal
it she does. > The arch concessions of Anna Mav Wona' are
shown up at their true value. ]\Iusk, snake-hips, almond
eyes. Grace Chiang could go among the Asta Nielsens, for
her ability of expression has that purity that lacks all callow-
ness or cant, to be found only among the chosen few.

The story as a thriller, does thrill. Not sustainedlv
perhaps. Mr. Bob Stoll acts a dual role, and if he is a little
too obvious as the villain of the piece, he is winning enough
as the hero. There is one terrific accident that makes the
heart leap into the mouth — a little masterpiece of cinema
craft. As we have said, those who have seen, and will see
UberfnJJ, will be able to conceive what happens to us when
this frightful, shrieking, flaming mass catapults into our
very midst !

Frau im Mond (The Girl in the Moon).

Fritz Lang's film had quite an amazing reception at its
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premiere. ^Ir. H. G. Wells described Metropolis as the
world's silliest film, and this is another. But, like
Metropolis, if you accept the Jules Verne aspect, there is
considerable entertainment to be drawn from it. The most
curious thing about Lang is his utter inability to progress.
The technique of his first film is the technique he uses to-day.
We still have the same strutting instead of acting, the same
wide-flung, over-emphatic gesture, the same mammoth
ponderousness.

There are some excellent sequences, as there always are;
some magnificent photography, as there always is ; and an
absence of all logic that would be perfectly baffling if it had
not always been the same I

Quite the best scenes are those preparatory to the rocket
leaving for the Moon. Crowds, searchlights, radio. The
giant missile, sleek and polished, slowly wheeled from its
hangar. And, here an excellent technical idea, maintained in
equilibrium bv partial immersion in a giant tank of water.
This, being pre-supposed, as a necessity for controlling the
send-off. Suspense is easily gained here, for this much of
it is credible, possible, and the massive, portentous style of
Lang well suited to the massiveness of the subject.

A roar and the comet is off. Cheers greeted this at the
premiere, and indeed, it was very good. Then we are
switched to the interior of the rocket, a rather lovely thing,
so brightly polished and decorative. Gasping for breath
brings them all to death's door until the world's atmosphere
with its gravitational pull are passed. And now, in the
realm of pure imagination, imagination is not so pure after
all. When liquid poured out, floats in bubbles that can be

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caught in the hand and rebottled, it is a small thing and
delights us. But when at the approach to the moon the ship
trembles so that no one can stand up, why does every fixture,
every spring, the blankets on the beds, remain as still as the
air before a cyclone ?

But these are not the questions it is necessary to ask. We
don't ask to be credulous. But we might have asked for
more imaginative treatment of the lunar landscape. Here,
if anywhere, was opportunity for sublime grotesqueness of
decor. The only thing that came near it was the vicious lake
of solfaturas. Backgrounds had large labels Studio
Prop," pasted all over them.

However, great praise or great damnation would count
little. Everybody will want to see the film, and they should
certainly do so.

* «- ^

French Season,

Mr. Stuart Davis has done a very wise and a very clever
thing in his arrangement of a French season, which is now
having so great a success at the Avenue Pavilion. An
arrangement of national seasons is quite obviously the most
clear and orderly manner not only to help film students to
comprehend the salient characteristics of film consciousness
in different nations, but to bring the public to an under-
standing of methods consistently different from the methods
to which they are accustomed — an understanding that could
not possibly be arrived at through casual mixing of pro-
grammes. Congratulations must go to Mr. Davis for his
astuteness of taste, and his cleverness in obtaining so
satisfactorily a representative collection from the significant

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artistic productions of tliat country. The organisation of
such a scheme is more than simple hard work ; it
needs devotion and punctihousness. This significant
Season has come about without any " blah " or beating of
drums — a testimony to its soundness. There is none of the
pious ostentation that can be found among groups in Europe
and America noteworthy, alas, less for their artistic invoila-
bility than their assumption of it ! The French Season
comes from orderly and conscientious interest. We hope
sincerely that it will be the first of a series of equally success-
ful national seasons of the same representatiye impeccability.

G. W. Pabst is at work on a scenario for a war-film which
promises to be of great interest. It will be throughout a
sound film, and will embody the three different points of
yiew of war-time Germany, France and Great Britain. The
French episodes will be based on a work by Barbusse, and
it is probable that the English will be taken from a play by
Miles Malleson. Each nation will speak in its own lan-
guage. It is said that it will have a strong anti-war appeal.

* *

Owing to a misunderstanding, the film Light and Shade
described in last month's Close Up was ascribed to Gussy
Lauwson, the Belgian director who has made a film of that
name. That alluded to was the Light and Shade of
S. Sandy, which will be shown at the Avenue Pavilion
during the French Season.

445

The Avenue Pavilion

101 Shaftesbury Avenue, W. 1

HOUSE OF 9ILENT SHADOW
A GAUMONT-BRITISH THEATRE

Joint Managing Directors : - { ^Vlti-LM Ev^NS.
Manager - - - - WILLIAM Baudains.
Director of Music - - Dulay.
Under the Direction of Stuart Davis.

The following attractions will be presented exclusive to this theatre :

FRENCH SEASON.

TWO TIMID SOULS

a Comedy by Ren6 Clair
also revival of GREED.

EN RADE

' Directed by Cavalcanti

also SALOME, featuring Xazimova

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

by Jean Epstein
also THE WALTZ DREAM directed by Ludwig Berger

Buses to the Door : — Nos. la, ic, 14, 14a, 19c, igd, 22, 24, 29, 29a, 29b, 29c, 38, 39, 48, 129, 138.

XezLS, Star, and Staridard.

Continuous Performances DAILY, commencing at 2 p.m. till 11 p.m. SUNDAYS 6 — 11
Each session lasts three hours, thereby making 3 sessions per day, viz : —

2 till S S till 8 8 till II

MATINEES recommended for choice of comfortable seats.

53 Rue St. Roch • PARIS

Tel : GUTENBERG 35-88

Has the World Distributio?i of :

EX RADE— RIEX OUE EES HEURES— LA PTITE LILY,

By a. CAA'ALCANTL
LA ZONE, By G. LACOMBE.

L' ETOILE DE MER— EMAK BAKL\, By MAX RAY.
ERXEST ET AMELIE, By J de CASEMBROOT.
LA COQUILLE ET LE CLERGYMAX, By G. DULAC.
LA FILLE DE L'EAU, By J. REXOIR.
BRUMES D'AUTOMXE, By D. KIR5AX0FF.
RYTHMES D' UXE CATHEDRALE, By L LAXDAU.
LA BALLADE DU CAXART, By A. SILKA.
LES TROGLODYTES, By :\L ALLEGRET.
PARIS EXPRESS, By DUHAMEL.

I DO LOVE TO BE BESIDE THE SEA SIDE, By 0.

BLAKESTOX.
BITHULITE, By P. SICHEL.
VUE HEUREUSE, By C. HEYMAXX.
PARTIE DE CAMPAGXE, By A. STIL\SSER.
LA MARCHE DES MACHIXES— LES XUITS ELECTRIQUES-

PARXASSE, By EUGEXE DESLAAV.
VOYAGE AU COXGO, By AXDRE GIDE and MARC

ALLEGRET.

SO THIS IS MARSEILLE, By CLAUDE LAMBERT.

l^a plus import ante revue franca is e
de Qinhna

La Cinematograpliie
rrancaise

CHAQUE SEMAIXE TOUTES LES XOUVELLES DU CINEMA

Films en Preparation
Analyses cles Noiiveaiix FiLns
Clironiqiie de L Exploitation

Clironiqiie rmanciere

LES PROGRES DE LA TECHNIQUE
LES NOUVELLES INVENTIONS

'•iz'-itirre^ Auienque, AUemagne, Espagne^ Italie

DIRECTEUR REDACTEUR EX CHEF : P.-A. HARLfi
19 RUE DE LA COUR DES XOUES PARIS (20')

Telephone : Roq. 04-24

T> r\ T7' O

BOOKS

NOVEMBER
FOR CHRISTMAS

The stock of books at John and
Edward Bumpus, Ltd., covers all
tastes and interests except those
which are highly technical, and
contains every variety from cheap
reprints to the magnificent work
of private presses. The address
is 350 Oxford Street, London, W.l,
and the telephone number Mayfair
1223. November is the best month
to buy books.

RUMPUS

Miller & Gill (1924) Ltd.

94 CHARING CROSS ROAD

LONDON W.C.2

FOR ALL THE
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BOOKS ON THE THEATRE,
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LES CHRONIQUES ET RUBRIQUES :
Pierre MacOrlan .... Tragedies et divertissements populaires.
Henri Vandeputte Habitudes pref^rees.

Paul Fierens Des rues et des carrefours (Lettre de Paris).

Denis Marion . . . . . . Le sentiment critique.

Pierre Courthion ..... La boite a surprise (tableau des mcEurs artistiques

contemporaines) .

Andre Delons Le cinema a Paris.

Franz Hellens Chronique des disques.

Nico Rost Chroniques de Berlin

Audre de Ridder L'anthologie esth^tique.

P.-G. van Hecke La peinture.

Gille Anthelme Les sports.

Bernard Brunius Inventeurs et Inventions.

Albert Valentin Le coeur a I'ouvrage.

UN ROMAN DE :
Sacher Purnal ..... " GoUigwog."

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Editor : K. Macpherson
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Published by POOL
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Contents

As is ....

Stuttgart and Its Effects

Vertoff, His Work and the Future

Talk on Technique

Second-Rate Sex .

The Amateur Convention

A Certificate of Approval

Turksib ....

Movie : New York Notes

Dental Dilemma .

L'Esprit Moyen et le Cinema »

Comment and Review

Kenneth Macpherson
A. Kraszna Krausz
Jean Lenauer

OSWELL BlAKESTON

Norma Mahl
R. Bond
Bryher
H. D.

H. A. Potamkin
Hugh Castle
Freddy Chevalley

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London Correspondent :
Hollywood Correspondent
New York Correspondent
Berlin Correspondent :
Geneva Correspondent :
Moscow Correspondent :

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\Jean Lenauer

Robert Herring
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; H. A. Potamkin

A. Kraszna -Krausz

F. Chevalley

P. Attasheva

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OF IMPORTANCE TO THE EPICURE
OF THE FILM

THE

Love of Jeanne Ney

ILYA EHRENBURG

Translated from the Russian by

HELEN CHKOUSCHOFF MATHESON

7/6 net

Ilya Ehrenburg, whose works are appearing in practically
every European language, is one of the most conspicuous
of the younger post-revolutionary school of Russian
novelists. " The Love of Jeanne Ney " — cf which the
''pirated" and inaccurate film version caused something
of a sensation last year — is a rapidly moving novel of Bol-
shevik intrigue, the action cf which takes place in Russia
and Paris.

PETER DAVIE5 LTD. So HENRIETTA ST.

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Vol. V No. 6 December 1929

AS IS

BY THE EDITOR

To the retrospective mind, the end of a vear that gave us
wStuttgart, La Sarraz, as banners to the avant garde — that
strange platoon forever marking time — that saw the dawn
of montage consciousness, not akogether unHke the angry
weal of an insect sting, and sent or promised a thousand
and one mixed blessings, talkies iiberall; needs some re-
capitulation, some winnowing thoughts to shape its varying
developments for future benefit.

Perhaps the wide screen is upon us, and all our theories
to date will go before the new, strange shape that cinema
will assume. If we are like children now, soon we will be
infants again, all of us together, starting again, none cleverer
than the rest, all equally unsure, and, without any doubt,
all equally determined to be first to see the new path, and to
point it out tirelessly to the still bewildered sucklings, perhaps
not (to be candid) in the hope that they will follow, so much
as acclaim. We are all verv tribal reallv, and self is the

447

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first animal law, really, and all the conflict of the world might
cease or become rational in the recognition of the first
physical law of the jungle, the veldt, the steppe, the forest,
the prairie, the ice world — I am. I am, I am — or I am not.
If I am not, then you darn well won't be either. Or some
such formula.

But this, perhaps, carries us a little (onlv a little, if we
look closely) from our subject. The more one dabbles in
theory, the more mythical, evanescent and intangible does
theory become. Not in the sense of unattainable divinitv,
but in the sense of sheer invalidity. Theory, made too
precise, can onlv impoverish. Perhaps because each of us
is a theoretician to himself alone, and the assimilation of
theory from an outside source chokes up original perception
with induced perception, which can have no richness or native
element in us. If I see things this way and am told I must
see them that way, it spoils my chance of seeing them any
way all. I become self-conscious about my reaction. That
is the primitive definition. And what has been removed is
psycho-surgical. I have been deprived of the initial purity
of visual experience. And in being deprived of spontaneous
visual experience I am being deprived of something much
deeper — the psvchic balance of wish fulfilment. To-day it
is commonlv known that what we see is not necessarily what
is in front of us, but only that part of it to which we react
visually-mentally-emotionally. Unless I assume that my
mental-emotional-visionary experience is identical with that
of others, in making deductions and constructing a
summarised and at best fragmentary postulation, I am
seeking to impose something which must instantly refute

448

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itself, something which becomes a He. Yet man is never
satisfied until his text-books de-educate an assimilative world.

The future is going to bring new and alwavs greater
problems. Let us understand at least what we have been
working at until now before we attempt to cope with them.
We are fortunate, says Pabst, to have had the silent film
first, for without it our eye would not have been trained to
see. As it is, there exists a tradition of fluiditv to which
the talking film is trying to work back. If sound had come
first there would have been none of it, no philosophy of
visual exploration. The link with stage would have been too
suggestively apparent to have been swept aside for tentative
and dubious experiment.

We are fortunate to have had the silent film first if we are
going to understand it and make use of its essential references
for the new technique of sound-sight. But few people,
directors included, have grasped the fundamentals of film
building. The whole theorv of it (individual theory, don't for-
get) has been left too unarranged, unguessed or overlooked.
The arrival of arbitrations from the USSR, instead of
clearing away some of the muddle, seemed only to puff away
the last remnants of simplicitv and craft on a wind of super-
stition— an uninvestigated obeisance that seems to have
permanently damaged the style of many who had been able
at least to tell their story with modesty and reserve. The
dread word montage ran like a plague. Few could cope with
it, most succumbed. Then talking films, we learnt in the
press, dated it. Certainly montage was no more, except
whipped to and fro, a storm in a teacup, up and down the
ranks of the avant garde and among ambitious damnateurs.

449

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Those who had seen the good Russian films were right in
acclaiming their richness. Btit none too manv recognised
the difference between admiring them and understanding
them, between exploration of their inferences and imitation
of their method without anv inferences at all.

The Russian method was taken to mean montage and
nothing more, and montage was taken to mean nothing more
than tilting the camera and snipping awav much needed
footage. The fact that the montage of the films that so fired
inspiration had been adopted primarily to convev the
necessary implications of the stories thev were telling, was
not taken into account, and, indeed, the startling anachronism
arose that montage, which is continuity, was emphatically
not continuit}'. Only the more spectacular manifestations
of this particular craft were taken into account, those sur-
charged passages that swept the films to climax: and these
were seized upon as a clue to entire reconstitution of
technique, although it would haye seemed obyious, eyen from
the start, that tremendous speed must achieye power mainly
through its relation to quietness and the pause. Quietness
and the pause, howeyer, were out of fayour. The result was
a garrulous and snobistic falsitA'. Simple subjects became
fussy abominations. Witness Czinner's Pola Negri film,
witness U Argent — intolerabh' bumptious frauds. The most
rudimentary inferences of the methods that excited them had
been utterly unsuspected. Cameras sloped, tottered, tilted,
rushed, fell and toppled, all for no reason. And Czinner and
L'Herbier are not tlie weakest of their kind.

If only they wotild get down to sotirce, source, source.
The source for which H. A. Potamkin asks continually. If

450

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they would only forget the half-baked theories, and think
what they want to express, what they want to reveal, they
themselves as Hfe-witnesses, seeing Hfe Avith their own eyes,
in their own way. You would think that we hardly need to
be told that the only expression for the implied is the
phvsical. But have even Czinner and L'Herbier recognised
this? ^Movement is not enough, we must know what move-
ment itself implies. We must go to psycho-analysis to
understand that action is the modified outgiving of inter-
acting conscious and unconscious adjustment. I repeat that
in cinema it is bv action we are to judge primarily. With
the advent of sound will come in time sound imagery too.
I pointed out in an article on Blackmail that in one instance
at least, Hitchcock made use of the associative symbolism of
sound. To an overwrought girl, guiltv of murder, the sound
of the shop bell becomes a clanging crescendo ending in a
kind of scream. You might call that inferential. But it is
physical, too. The sound has come through her ears and
has been translated to her but (equally to us, who are
accredited with the super-power of being able to see and hear
her unconscious) as the warning blare of danger. " Through
that door may come the police ". It is because of us, because
we have to be enlightened, that film can never be purely
expressive. What we are seeing is Avhat has been turned to
us, not unlike, in primary intention, the theatre method of
setting the stage and everybody on it to face the audience.
We are not watching something happening to somebody else,
we are experiencing our own reaction to something which has
been dissected and spread out for the precise purpose of our
comprehension, and unconscious participation. Film is, in

451

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other words, a process of explanation — the simplest form of
which is action. The film of riding, racing, flying, and so
on. The highest form is not the film of inference and
suggestion, though that, evidently, is far above the film of
simple movement, but the film of imagery and action-
psychology and physiology, or, better still, psychology
through physiology. But here we are getting into deep
water, though I shall hope to be able to navigate it in some
forthcoming issues.

Come with me to the rudimentary principle of expression.
Eyes opening wide will explain that the person we see is in
terror. But terror means nothing to us, it is not dramatic,
nor melodramatic, until we have looked for and discovered
the cause. It is then a matter of our decision as to whether
the cause w^ould (and therefore by simple displacement does)
terrify us too, or move us to contempt or laughter — whether
we are induced to associate or identify ourselves with the
terror we are witnessing, or w^hether we scorn it, and associate
ourselves in a friendly (if sadistic) alliance with the cause of it.

In Dreyer's film of terror, Joan's terror is not our terror
because the cause of it is too blatantlv (to be unkind) Comedie
Frangaise, too traditionally and elaborately theatre. We
have to reject the cause of it — the posturing, grimacing
militant ecclesiasts, as Joan herself would have rejected them,
knowing well enough from the armoury of her visionary
over-world experience (or unconscious divination) how to deal
with them. If Dreyer had indicated, as I have said before,
that Joan was a victim of law and order and justice as
impersonal as you can reasonably expect from an arbitration
of formularised tentatives, the collapse of her consummate

452

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diplomatic, economic and political resources (apart from the
consideration of which particular plane of consciousness they
derived from) would have brought home to us a real sense
of doom and pity. The sensational collapse of Joan remains
throughout history a contemporaneous idea for every age,
our own included. Dreyer's film of Joan bore no hint of the
illuminating references it might have contained. This, how-
ever, is a little apart from the point. Our deduction for now
is that this intensive film of phvsiological onslaught failed as
a tragedy through lack of associative self-surrender in us —
for lack of the physiology of psychology.

Mother remains as one of the most immediately recog-
nisable examples of physiologv and inferential psychology
well balanced. From the obvious imagery of the rising mists
to the final impact of bloodv violence, from the stormy
blowing of the mother's flag (inferential imagery of intensely
spiritual insistence) to the drunken death of the father,
we can deduce a finalitv of concentric and indiA'isable
connections.

Metronome montage is to vision what squad drill is to
movement. ^Making multiplication tables of your frames
should be considered valid only for scenes that are ruled, so
to speak, by the company sergeant major. Robot rhythm.s.
Purer movement can so much more accurately be felt with
the brain, with the eye, with the finger tips, with the
measuring rod and the metronome of psychic experience. If
you have the gift of vision. If you have the gift of vision.
Purer movement can be felt more purely. A simple,
elementarv rhvthm can well, and even to advantage, be con-
trolled bv the measuring rod. Free movement must be free,

453

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controlled movement should be checked mechanically — left,
right, left, right, left, right.

Theory, theory. There is the theory that builds theory.
And the theory that explodes theor}'. Remember, your
theory is more yalid, more yaluable to you than any you can
borrow. Remember, action came first, theory afterwards.
There was more unity to Mother than there was to The End
of St. Petersburg, and more unity to The End of St.
Petersburg than to Storm Over Asia. Theory had eyolyed
a surer mechanism, but something had been lost. Eyen
understanding had to some extent been lost. The tendency
pointed toward watchfulness, towards preciousness. The
bigger sweep was finalb.' mindful of some convention,
keeping approved pattern. Atrophy was not altogether
absent.

I do not say do not have theory, I say have your own
theory. ^Ir. Potamkin is right to insist on source. Know
Avhere vour source is, realise the uses of your experience.
Remember the only real kino-eve is vour own eye. What
it sees is your cinema. Build cinema as vision, your own
vision, and you will build something worth while.

Kenneth Macpherson.

454

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EXHIBITION IN STUTTGART,
JUNE, 1929, AxND ITS EFFECTS

The initiative of planning film-exhibitions is bv no means
new. Its practical execution is a failure nearly everv year,
always in a diff erent country, always in a different place ;
though mostly big, powerful organisations and official
experts would participate. In spite of which the result has
been mostly — in the best cases — a representatiye show of
advertisements or of cinema-apparatus, and sometimes also a
mass-performance of films. Apparently without a clear aim,
or a system according to the material, and without being con-
vincing. At the end the critics had already begun to believe
that film was a matter scarcely fit for exhibition. It was only
the non-prejudiced who recognised that the principal mistake
of all such attempts was that they had tried to show the com-
mercial side before all and left the nucleus of the craft in the
shadows of the background.

As it is — in the beginning of this year the news of another
film-exhibition was received with mixed feelings. Besides
the principal experience (already hinted at) ihe new proposal
seemed especially to have many probable negative qualities
and only a few doubtful positive ones. Stuttgart, the place
that had been taken in view for this purpose, though one of

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the most intensively developing cities of Germany, seemed
much too far away from the significant film activities,
which are concentrated in Berlin. The arranging Deutsche
Werkbund is esteemed as an organisation that goes in for
honest work and good quality in all spheres ; but its contact
with film could hardly have been considered sufficient.

The general question was, whether the gentlemen of the
Werkbund in Stuttgart with all their enthusiasm for what
is good, would be able to muster sufficient knowledge
to recognize the specific value that lies in the sphere of film,
to keep out the original tastelessness of fashionable innovators,
and to fight the hindering tradition of cinema-business. At
the end of all these questions one shook one's head in resigna-
tion and with a rather tired gesture passed over the rare signs
of the elementary preparations. Only when in the middle
of the floating events the final programme w^as made public
did one listen with increasing interest. And he who did
not shirk the long trip from Berlin or somewhere else, saw
different things that — from the German situation at least — had
the value of being new.

Though not a film-exhibition par excellence, but in the first
respect a very intensive collection of modern photography
(and in connection with it the regular performance of the
work done till now bv those young and detached ones, who
call themselves within and beyond the frontier the Avant-
garde), the spectator was won by the sympathetic endeavours
of Herrn Gustav StotZy commercial leader of the Wurttevi-
bergische Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Deutschen Werkbundes
to whom the whole thanked its existence.

* * *

456

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Not only because of its importance the photographic
exhibition must be remembered, but also, and principally
because of the valuable recognitions by which the Stuttgart
photographs led to conclusions for films.

From Germany, England, France, Holland, Austria,
Russia, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, and the United States
one saw the collected work of those who assert themselves to
belong to photographic production that is consciously modern.
Before one reached the pictures grouped after their original
countries and personalities, one went through a room created
by Pro/. L. Moholy-Nagy that represented the development
since Daguerre and the spheres of scientific, reporting and
advertising photography, in large, distinct lines ; the final
conclusion of the whole is that the task of photography of to-
day is to devote its specific technical means to the active
service of the present time, by immediate, unembelHshed
catching of true impressions of life.

The truth of this sentence can then be tested by examples
given in the exhibition, in an interesting way. It becomes
clearly apparent, that the most characteristic and strongest
impression is given by pictures that unveiledly aim at a
certain purpose (as the photos of material byPaul Oiiterbridge,
New York; the photos of fashion by George de Hoyningen-
Huene, Paris) — or by those pictures that give an unfaked
reproduction of situations (war-photos of the Reichsarchiv
Potsdam ; criminal - photos of the Wiirttembergisches
Polizeiprdsidium, Stuttgart) — that vitally catch physiog-
nomies (women-photos by Otto Umhehr^ Berlin; mens'-
photos bv Helmar Lerski, Berlin) — immediately discovered
objects (photos of architecture by Renger-Patzsch, Harzburg ;

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animal-photos by Hedda Walter, Berlin ; flower-photos by
Imogen Cunningham, California: photos of ovsters bv
Edward Weston, California).

But everywhere, where one had got too far distant from the
purpose, and approached the artistic modification of the object
(portrait-photography by Cecil Beaton, London) — where the
decorative treatment is in the foreground (material-photos bv
Hans Finsler, Halle) where original perspectives are sought
for but for their own value (genre-photographs bv L. Moholv-
Nagy, Berlin) — where black-and-white contrasts are noisilv
elaborated (photos of scenery by Sascha Stone, Berlin) —
where an intermediate state becomes the function of a result
in an original way (negative-photos by Andreas Feininger,
Dessau) — where the interest for the object is replaced by
shrewd composition (abstract-photos bv Francis Bruguiere,
London) — where optic distortions reach for laughable effects
caricature-photos by Werner Graff, Berlin) — where scraps of
pictures are cut and made up for a unit (photo-cuttings by
Hanna Hbch, The Hague' — where abstract lights on the
plate attempt to substitute concrete idea (photogramms by
Man Ray, Paris) — there, ves, there the new photographv dis-
tinguishes itself from the old one onlv bv a trick, that bluffs
to-day as well as it will be surpassed to-morrow. If one rises
immediately against anticompositions " that treat lines,
against decorative still-Hfes, and impressionistic landscapes,
if one stands up against manual procedures, technical tricks
and plavs of art-craft, one must not forget that phiro-
gramms, photocutting and modified optical drawings move
in the same sphere.

It is fascinating to witness the crystallization of young

458

Mutiny. A Sovkino film directed by Timoshenko.

Sta??ipede, a British Instructional Film of African life, made by the
Court Treatt expedition and acted throughout by natives. Above,
the heroine with the young giraffe whose capture is an important part
of the film. Below, waterbuck at the water-hole.

Stampede. ^ The chief and elders mar\-el ar the capture of a water-pvrhon.-
This British Instructional Film has only a modicum of srorv. dealins wirk
the efforts of the chiefs to secure living for the tribes constantly threatened^
by famine and drought.

Grace Chiang, whose amazing and poignant acting in Erno Aletzner's film,
Achtiing, Liebe—Lebensgefahr (Where's Love, There's Danger), has earned
her a place in the front rank of the few great artists of the screen.

Prom / Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside, a Studio Film by Oswell

Blakeston.

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technical methods at first, for they are always a sign of de-
velopment and so also of liveliness. It is also instructive to
watch how these must die off, if they are overbred as an
expression of themselves, instead of finding the wav to lasting
contents by suppression of their own. The expres-
sion, technics, is civilisation, life of the bodv and conse-
quently mortal. The contents, the art, is culture, life of the

soul and so perhaps immortal.

* * ♦

These sentences have been perhaps deliberately bumptious,
if one considers that it is film that is going to be spoken of. I
have got a little bit afraid, too, and so I look into the pages
of the programme of both the Stuttgart cinemas that showed
the selection of the film-exhibition from the 13th to the
24th of June. What about the ' iimortality there?

But let us leave this difficult word aside and be content with
the search for durability. One will surely not find the most
permanent works of the film done till to-day, as their
collection on one spot for a certain time still must meet the
most complicated and most ridiculous difficulties of film-
business. But still we find some titles announced in the list,
which can be considered as fitting without any discussion.
At first I am going to speak only about play-films already
known from regular performances. As follows: — Das
Cabinet des Dr, Caligari by Robert Weine; Varieie
by E. A. Dupont; Geheimnisse einer Seele by G. W,
Pabst; Dirnentragbdie with Asia Neilsen — of German
origin. Johanna von Orleans by C. Dreyer — of French
origin. Zehn Tage, die die Welt erschiitterteny by 5. M.
Eisenstein; Die letzten Tage von St, Petersburg by W.

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Pudovkin; Arsenal by Dovjenko — of Russian origin.
Zirkus by Chaplin; Chicago by Frank Urson — of American
origin.

From a collaboration so to speak between industrial organi-
sation and modern artists arose the following pictures, some
of which can be called documentary films : The Kipho-
Werbefilm and the Kreuzwortrdtselfilm by Giiido Seeber;
Prinz Achmed by Lotte Reiniger; Die Symphonie einer
Grosstadt by Walter Ruttmann ; hiflatioii and introduction
to Ariadne by Hans Richter ; Kreislauf des Wassers by
Robert Bluin ; Die Wnnder der Kamera bv Dr, Edgar
Beyfuss; Kuddehnuddel bv Alex Strasser — of German
origin. Leben in Wassertropfen, Wiinner und Seerosen, by
Mol — of Dutch origin. Der Floreiitiner Hut by Rene Clair
and L'Isle de Paris by Lacombe — of French origin. Lenins
Wahrheit, Das elfte Jahr, Der sechste Teil der Welt,
Kinoauge, Der Mann mit dem Kinoapparat, bv Dziga
Vertoff; and Pamir of Russian origin.

Avantgarde-films in the strict sense of the word Diagonal
Symphonie by Viking Eggeling ; Opus 2 — 4 by Walter
Ruttmann — of German origin. Die Brucke, Regen,
Brandung by Joris Ivens — Dutch origin. Variationen der
Ungeduld by Dekeukelaire — of Belgian origin. Entr'acte by
Rene Clair, Emak Bakia, Etoile de Mer by Man Ray, Die
Miischel by Germaine Dulac, Lichter und SchnelUgkeiten by
Beaumont, La Marche des Machines by Eugene Dezlav — of
French origin. Leo Tolstoi, Aujstieg, hjEsther Schub — of
Russian origin.

It would take too much space, should I try to speak about
all of these films single and detailed. The first mentioned

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biggest films are presumably generally well known. And
the non-German work of the smaller ones is not unknown to
the readers of this paper.

The Russian Work of a more recent date will probably
make an exception. Such as the monographic pictures cut
from old weekly shows by Esther Schub, w^hich leave an inter-
esting impression of their object but only a grey one of their
quality as a film. Vertoff's art of reporting, wilful and
based only upon the rhythm of cutting would deserve a special
analysis sometime. It is Dovjenko, who seems to be the
most original and at the same time the most valuable; he
transfers Russian naturalism from a symbolic play into power
restrained by quietness. It will be possible to come to a
conclusion only after all his work stands before us as a whole ;
Stuttgart only showed cuttings.

Some words still about the German Films shown. Already
the director of the first of them, Viking Eggeling, was origin-
allv a Norwegian painter, who only lived in Germany and
made its Diagonalsymphonie there. It represents the
first attempt at a radical abstract picture. In the way of
ornaments of diagonal lines changing in the movement; a
play, whose charm is perceivable only in single moments, and
that does not touch us otherwise. Quite different the abstract
films of Walter Ruttman, that seem even now in a distance of
eight years to be the strongest products of their kind. Possibly
because the abstraction of those pushing, flashing and sliding
geometrical bodies is no more abstraction for it reveals distinct
associations with contents. As a third Hans Richter coming
too from the painters' circles w^hose optical picture-combina-
tions and distortions were allowed to serve as introductions

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and intermezzis for industrial playfilms. In contrast to him —
who searched for an eventual expression of technical means,
without being able to rule out of them his antecedent — Guido
Seeber has found shrewd variations for advertising films
rising from technics which he playfully commands. Robert
Blum cuts strange landscape-pictures to a unit of compre-
hension. Alex Strasser finds talented ideas in feuilletonistic
contemplation of everyday life for the weekly show. And
Dr, Beyfiiss chooses examples for different kinds of camera-
work out of foreign documentary films and weekly shows.

The most striking thing for the contemplator of these
films is the fact that they incline towards industrial manu-
facture in the course of time in an increasing scale. While
in America a too vehement film industry suppresses a too weak
Avantgarde and in France a too vehement Avantgarde over-
powers a too weak industry; in Germany — and it is similar
in Russia — a mid-heavy industry seems to mix with a mid-
heavy Avantgarde. Here one often likes to grumble about the
commercialized production of the German film, which hinders
the rising of new ideas and new men ; and yet — if we look upon
it from the perspective of to-day — it must appear that just in
the most brilliant period of film-Germany (between 1921 and
1925) the experimentors, who in other countries had to deal
with small and smallish work here found rich opportunity to
transfer their revolutionary ambitions into work of greatest
style. I not only think of the above-mentioned pictures,
Caligari, Variete^ Geheimnisse einer Seele, but also of
formerly popular films by Lubitschf Langy Pick and Murnau.

The German Avantgarde of these times has found also new
contents for new technics, while the French had been

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forced to discover new technics, without their contents ever
turning up. The French waited for tasks that never came.
They practised for a work which they have expected in vain.
They have made reclamations already in every sphere ; they
searched in all the streets and cul-de-sacs without finding
ways, and before all without seeing an aim. They played —
sometimes carried by enchanted moods — the most difficult
studies. And somebody just passing by in the street also
sometime or other caught an ingenious accord, surrounded
it by a couplet and became rich. The neighbourhood, the
environment, the audience however, got nervous, grumbled
and shut its windows, for one could not listen to studies and
scales for a long time, even if a Paganini played them. And
a Paganini of film does not even exist ; and film itself is by
no means a violin.

Twelve hours express train — from the train directly changed
into a little Stuttgart performance room, in which people
w^ho believe themselves Paganinis, play their films and film-
studies for hours and hours. Can you wonder now that
somebody staggering back into the street with a somewhat
dizzy head at dawn had to come to the following conclusions ?

It is to be considered as a great merit of the leaders of the
Stuttgart Exhibition that they took the great trouble of
showing a considerable part of international Avantgarde
work in this demonstration, revealing a sectional view. On
this occasion one could see, that in the film beyond industry
there is as much stuff as in the film within industry,

One perceived how much temperament, spirit and craft had
been invested and split up in these little films. One saw that
the Avantgarde could claim more right of existence if it

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was connected with a w^iole army behind it — practically or
only theoretically. One saw that outpost struggles can be a
cute thing, but if they want to fulfil their purpose they need
a system, a plan. Which is lacking to-day.

A. Kraszna-Krausz.

VERTOFF,
HIS WORK AND THE FUTURE

As one of the most significant events of the xes-V there comes
to my mind Frankfurt and Dsiga \>rtoff at a matinee
explaining the theory of the Kinoki, {the kino-eve) of which
he is the inventor, not in words alone, but with the help
of clear and beautiful examples of his work amplv demon-
strating his ability to translate his theorv into practice.
Kinoki is unposed, unplayed film, independent both of actors
and of studio. \"ertoff watches human expressiveness,
gestures, incidents, and when he succeeds in surprising these
at their characteristic moments he registers them and
produces results that are extraordinarily valuable.

But this is not enough for him. In his last film. The Man
with the Movie-camera, he shows us the ropes of artistic
creation. When he has aroused our emotions and carried
us aw'ay with a powerful scene, he shows the operator
filming the scene or the montress joining the strips of film.

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One might imagine that his films can be no more
than intelligent reporting. They are nothing of the
kind. They are complete creations. And \>rtof[,
moreover, in what he calls Radioki, (the eve of the
radio) presented sound before speech-films had been heard
of. He has some remarkable ideas as to the future of the
cinema : foreseeing the time, which he believes not far
distant, when films will be presented not only in colour and
reHef and with the odours proper to what is shown, but also
telepathically . A film thought, for example bv \^ertoff him-
self, would appear simukaneously upon all the screens in
the world, probabh' bv that time installed in private
apartments rather than in public cinemas. The forecasts of
this genius (I am chary of the word but in this instance its
full meaning is applicable) seem fantastic until we take the
trouble of considering them carefully, when the possibility
of their realisation becomes undeniable.

\^ertoff will have nothing of films he classes as theatrical,
that is to say films acted either by professionals or others.

The ingenuity of his method is worthy of illustration by
an example of his work. On one occasion he was taking
shots in an all-night cabaret. Naturally anxious to disguise
his operations he explained to the clientele the presence of
strange lamps bv telling them that the management wished
to experiment with a fresh lighting system and that later on
a film would be taken. While the many " experiments "
were being made his camera-men were at work. One was
in the street just outside a window, another concealed in the
roofing and a third, using an automatic camera, pretended
to help the electrician to shift the lamps, and registered

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everything indicated by A^ertoff. When at last the company
supposed a picture was about to be taken, \>rtoff and his
assistants made off. He had secured all he wanted. The
possibilities of this method are immediately evident and I
need not insist upon the vital sincerity of the resultant strips.
Vertoff is, moreover, a past master in the art of the angle of
vision, partly no doubt because the nature of his' work
moves him to take almost unconsciously exactly the right,
intelligible point of view. And upon this I would lav stress
because for some time past all the incapable film directors
have been gleefully on the look-out for interesting angles;
an absurdity the more irritating for the pretentiousness of
its origin. One is reminded in this connection of G. W.
Pabst whose camera angles are ruled by rigorous necessity :
by the logic of the action. Hence the enchanting, mag-
nificent power of his films.

In the evening I was glad of the opportunity of talking
to Vertoff, for my sincere admiration of his ideas does not
exclude certain reservations. His films, in my opinion,
must necessarily be limited. There are, for example, certain
emotions which his method, repudiating artifice, is incapable
of handling. I suggested to him the following scene : a
woman in a darkened room at night, tormented by her
thoughts. How, without special lighting, could such a scene
be registered ? After a brief hesitation he extricated him-
self : " I cannot discuss all my methods. They would be
imitated bv other producers." This, I fancy was a jest.
Vertoff' knows that such a scene could be produced only in
a studio. He admitted besides that the emotional film does
not interest him. So be it. But the limitation is incon-

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testable. The problems and conflicts which we call
emotional " are of enormous importance in our lives and
no form of artistic expression can ignore them.

Vertoff is wrong in setting these aside. His method is
that of a formidable genius and his ideas for the future of
the cinema are consistent and, in my opinion, logical and
matter-of-course. Nevertheless he is mistaken in inferring
that the set scenes and deliberate contrivances of to-dav are
on the wrong track and that producers will sooner or later
accept his formula for cinematic creation. His attitude is
understandable when one realises the difficulties he has
encountered and still encounters in the way of driving home
the importance of his idea. His work is surrounded by an
uncomprehending silence. Hardly anyone outside Russia
has yet seen his films. And I am convinced that when he
is free to pursue his ideas to the uttermost he will at once
recognise that his system can never be the sole means of
visual creation. As it is he is forced to some extent to be
unfaithful to his own theory in so far as he uses projectors
and montage. For montage at least introduces the personal
element, walful interference with the raw material. More-
over, the direct, unacted film is a simplification deriving
from literature, and Vertoft' rejects the literary cinema.

But of more importance than all the battles of the theorists
is the fact that a cinematic genius of the first order is at work
in Vertoff. The suppleness of his technique is simply
stupefying, his sense of miontage and the rhythmic value of
images is perfect. The silent film, apparently at the end
of its resources, has much to learn from him though I will
not go so far as to sav that his films shake my confidence

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in speech-films; and he himself is waiting only for the
evolution of a reliable apparatus for registering sound to give
us a speech-film for which we may well wait in all eagerness
— not only for the pleasure to be derived from it, but for the
tremendous forward impetus it will give to the conception of
the uses of sound in film.

Jean Lenauer.

A TALK ON TECHNIQUE

A.B.C. OF THE NEW CINEMA.

Commercial cameramen still refuse to regard need as
opportunity. Lights have to be changed for close ups :
lamps are pushed in.

A director, under the influence of Eisenstein's visit to
England, might be encouraged to alter his camera angle for
each flash, but, if his cameraman is the usual commercial
harridan, unenterprising lighting will place a patina over the
montaged reels. There is only one man, working in
England, who is alive to the fact that each time the camera
is moved there is a chance for a new lighting effect. Without
levitation, or delphic inspiration, he is carrying out some
really excellent work. He is interested in his job, that is
his whole secret.

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Maculose fragments of print, worn out by eager fingers,
show some careful light-painting in close up. The usual
spotlight plays on the back of the hair, but not with that
alarming halo effect, and a spotlight on the ground, screened
by the back of the actress herself, catches a high light under
a cheek bone. Another spotlight, covered with a silk, is
trained on the right side of the face, and re-enforced with

inkies " spread in a semi-circle so that the intensity of
light on the face becomes appreciably less towards the mouth
and nose. To break up the shadows a fourth spotlight, also
silked, shoots over the camera, catching the glint in the eyes
of the woman and faintly illuminating the left side of the
face, which, otherwise, is in shadow. This one example
proves individual lighting, which means thought and results
in a sculpturally moulded piece of portraiture, the graded
shadow giving a remarkably stereoscopic appearance to the
pose.

Mr. Basil Emmott is one of the few personalities in the
world of British cinematographic photography. He flew
with Cobham to the Cape ; he was the first to use incandescent
lighting seriously in this country, apart from inkies " on
close ups ; he went to America to study all the methods,
systems, innovations connected with the future of the
coloured, sonorous, and stereoscopic cinema. Such varied,
and distinguished, experiences have made him a man of value
to film directors, journalists and brain-picking amateurs.

If," Mr. Emmott said to me, England wants to make
a conquest of the world's film market, LABORATORIES
must be built. The Americans believe that the money is in
the negative — and so it is — and they treat it with respect.' '

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In an almost frenetic manner he denounced the dust holes
which, in most cases, do duty for laboratories in this country.
As an immediate solution he suggested that all studios, over
here, pool their resources and build something up-to-date,
something to equal the marvellously efficient Consolidated
Film Laboratories of New York where seven and a half
million feet of stock are developed, and printed, each week.

As far as the mechanics of production are concerned Mr.
E. believes England could hold her own. He witnessed
several films in production in U.S.A., that is he noticed
several leading ladies sitting on directors' knees !

England's special failing is m.ental stinginess. Many of
New York's supers are four times the size of our latest
" atmospheric ", yet the seating capacity, in most cases,
is no larger. People don't tread on your toes at the Roxy.
And do you know that the factory of General Electric gives
work to twenty-three thousand hands? "

All very impressive, and not a w^ord about New York's sky-
line, iced water, or central heating, not even a quotation
from Beverley Nichols. Maybe he was too anxious to tell
me how America w^as going to get away with colour before
England had time to say G. K. Atkinson.

Ideas of splitting the film into two or three sections, for
natural colour processes, are, he holds, unsatisfactory. When
a fourth of the screen is enlarged, to fill the whole area, the
grain becomes correspondingly magnified. Wider stock,
would, of course, present a solution but immolate thousands
of small exhibitors. Sometimes the small men are willing
to buy, seldom to scrap.

Then, reaching for intelligence, I asked him about arc

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lights, long shots, the resultant heat of incandescent lighting.

America is going back to arcs. Flood lighting and
small eflfects, like splashing a small lamp across bricks to
raise them from the wall, are the legitimate employment for
the modern " inkies back lighting calls for economic
arcs."

The commutator hum, which occurs across an arc, can be
removed by means of suitable chokes, each being fitted
separately to the lamp according to the voltage.

Anyway, he is using arcs on his new talkie, and he does
not expect trouble. He was the first to have the courage to
abolish telephoto lenses, shooting talkies in continuity and
thereby obtaining the correct level of voices of the actors, so
a little of this sort of thing is expected of him !

O. B.

SECOND-RATE SEX, SEPTEMBER,

1929

A report on ABORT, by Norma Mahl.

Hark, Mr. Douglas — here's a tub for thumping !
Fie, other bats ! Why sleep with belfries bumping ?
How can the Book Club breathe when now^ so near
Free-thinkers rip all London holds most dear,

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And in her chastest hall, given to recitals.
Probe at her heart, her blood, her very vitals ?
Yes, softly, quietly, at the Whigmore Hall
Talkers deliberate. Sure, it's the Season's fall !

It is, quite literally. Dull foliage flies,
And trees, themselves again, greet clearing skies.
So, just as eagerly as leaves, there caper
Experts in sex to this staid, draper-
Hid, library-smothered hall.

Blowing up leaves .... that anyway would fall.

Leaves of convention, clogging man's clean roots,

Taking the sap from free gonadic shoots.

Lectures, discussions — then a film to show.

We feel that's ri^-ht. We link. And so we o"o,

Thinking hlm-conscious bodies can't be so

Pompous as we may feel ; a screen-sense means thev knoi^.

We go, quite earnest ; not to leer, but learn,
And if as yet we love not, still we vearn,
And though we mayn't believe, we hope and pray
With them that every dogma's had its day.
So to confront the night of ignorance, we creep
Waving old beacons lit by twilight sleep.
Dreaming on earth for a terrestrial heaven
Where life's clock no more stands at sex to seven.
Sure, we agree. The League m.ust win our thanks.
Who see a good case can come from its planks.
Gravely and bravely, we run dinner to tea ;
For the good cause, set psycho-sail to see.

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Much secrecy. The film cannot be shown.
(Ordinary precaution might this much have known.
Why do the people we would most exhort
Burn, for enthusiasm, elementary thought?
Can they be, then, in touch, with this to learn
Of english censors? Ssh, it's we who learn)
Much secrecy. A film behind closed doors,
Reached by a flying squad of free conspirators.
We'd heard the t rouble, felt the frill of fuss
And seen by Marble Arch, a private 'bus
Taking them forth to Revelation's screen,
Ambushed abortively in West Fourteen.

We follow, are arrived. A studio

Mentally " little Art "... orange, you know.

Figure in car outside says " to the left "

(Like thugs in thalking thilms of thin and theft).

A famous specialist greets us, dress-reformed;

Once more into the breeches we have stormed.

A flaxen female, stressed in red foularde,

Proves you can still be feminine and hard.

We notice spinsters, busv making hay

From withered grass none cut while it was May.

Phyl, who wed Will, would float around with Sidney,

Who'd find love free, but for a floating kidney;

Next her, an Indian, who'd love all with freedom

If they would only recognise his he-dom ;

Scrawny old men, devoid of sex at all,

But thinking this should let them lead the ball,

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And angry Workers who see one more luxury

They're bound to miss, in all this love and uxor-y.

Doubtful unwillingly, we crane our necks

To find some other sons to light up sex.

Alas, alas, for ardent aspiration ....

Hirschfeld himself would find but perspiration.

There's no electric thrill, no central heat;

A few cold shoulders and some frozen feet.

They look unhappy — cannot be the best.

Surely? How can one fight if one's repressed?

They've never had a sexual life at all,

With libidos a kitten-ravelled ball

Played with inside a buttoned, hook-nosed lip;

Their utmost stride, we feel, is but a slip.

Ssh, don't let's generalise. Let's wait and see.

These may be grim for battle. They may be — maybe.

But w^hy DO those whose programme is Be Free "

Use the imperative always of to be? "

There should be more than these ; the thing is right,

Sex must be freed from its pre-Shavian night,

And so on, so on — all the things w^e find

We've held and practised years long, undefined.

But then, of course, we aren't the ones to reach;

It's the great masses all this talk must teach.

Why aren't they here, then? Why not THIS or, that,

The cream or daily bread. Not this lean ham, pressed flat,

Trying to live 'twixt the two these represent?

It's all this play at pioneer I so resent.

All this loose energy, with a different name,

That makes sex just another amateur game

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For those who once joined groups for plehs and pomes

Now to produce, haphazardly, hormones.

Regard our prophets. Half in shorts and shirts,

The rest in evening bows and last-train skirts.

Neither at home in either. Ah, well, here's for your hopes !:

Love laughs at Goldsmith — he who'd conquer, Stopes.

The lights dim prematurely. Ssh, that word !

It'll stamp you retrogressive if you're heard.

The lights go out. This time they're meant to. Here

Is the Abortion film, so raise a cheer.

A chair ? No ! No, ABORTION. Can't you hear ?

Not very well . . . heredity ... in one ear
The film starts, after a russian doctor's said
It shows the harmful way to bring to bed
But not the right, germany won't allow it
(And it's a german copy). Why, then, show^ it?
Rather confusing shots of factory hands
Reading a notice. No one understands. —
It's out of focus. Don't let's ask too much
(How we repress ourselves here !). Ah, one expert touch
Has brought the frames right. Something. Still it's
queer . . .

But that a girl's expectant is quite clear.
She leaves the table, holding handkerchief. Feels sick.
Expert in audience, nausea ". Rather quick?
And can't we guess it ? Is this w^hat we learn ?
Ever heard this then ... in fainting, feathers burn.
You know it already? Shame, then ! Turn him out,
He's only come to put us all to rout.

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Girl buys a book, where diagrams proclaim
The flowering of the fruit that was Eve's shame.
One has not come to look at something pleasant
But surely these would wound an adolescent,
Put him off any sex-life ? Visual probes.
These large, cold diagrams; they'd set up phobes.

The w^oman thinks, and pays a midwife visit
And all's all right or ... . wait a moment .... is it ?
This is a russian film they keep repeating
(And that means auto-love for them at the first meeting.
One must love russian films, one has been told,
And pass the faults, because it's six years old ;
Also must murmur it's a german copy " . . . .
Prattle's a drug more potent than red poppy).
Midwife again. Illegal operation.
Borne to the hospital in consternation ....
Desperation . . students round like flies ....
And while the case is told them, patient dies ....
A student finds a handkerchief and cries . . .
CAN this be russian. Film breaks, amid sighs.
Lights please. The screen's moved. Really, what's more
free

Than move an entire screen when you can't see
As this strange woman did, while we all wait ?
An expert explains. Emulsion on the gate ".
He's kidding us? O, no. Kid liver oil . . .
Where was I now? O, yes, the goil.
She's dead, through ignorance and kiss.
Really ! We ask, what do we learn from this

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We haven't learnt before ? Think of The Son,

Der Gelbe Pass, Village of Sin, that other one,

Trois dans un Sous-sol, Bed and Sofa here . . .

We ask it seriously, shunning the easy sneer.

What do we see we haven't seen before?

Why give these babes on jerries this encore?

These tedious views of children being dressed I

Why in this film, when thev're in all the rest?

Did they take feet and feet of this and put it in

Whenever any film was looking thin ?

Why bring it over here, when there're these others

So much more modern, teaching more to mothers

Of every class? Are we just snobs, to lord

We who have seen the new ones, when they can't afford

To visit Berlin (it is SO expensive?)

Maybe. But freedom is extensive,

And thev who would set forth to re-chart sex

Should sail new ships, not fit out the old wrecks.

If we're reforming, let us get the best

To push our point, not have to be confessed

As being amateur, behind the times ....

Slack out-of-dateness is, of modern crimes,

The worst to those who in the vanguard work ;

To skim the ground you'd till is but to shirk

And seeds that should be sterile all you soav

If you refuse to take the time to know.

Even Theresa does a greater thing,
And old Potemkin takes it in its wing,
Covering it by its attitude of mind :

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One knows, there, what in everything to find.

What do they find here? What's their attitude?

They laugh at semen, not to think it rude,

And when a plan shows how the midwife slipped

A smothered shriek comes forth from thin-lipped

(And full-lipped, too) who knew — that's why they came —

What they might think they'd see. Think of the name,

ABORTION,

Let us pretend it's over, let us go

Before w^e lose what we already know.

We have learnt nothing. Still our instinct's right . . .

We KNEW before, all we have seen to-night.

AND we've seen films before; w^e get no kick

Watching a hand projector fail and flick.

No film that's real film, knowledge. Therefore what,

In the name of sexiness, have we got?

Pictures of spinsters (Radclyffes or with hair)

Waving a torch they flyblow, in the air.

Feeling they're full, if not of do, of dare.

Already they're " arrested ". Why then care

For all this dignified discomfort? Spare

Us from freedom with its rusty " must " ;

Rather let laws tell us some loves are lust,

Rather still let us sin " beneath the rose . . .

There's ample shade beneath for one who know^s.

The film of sex-reform is this and nothing more.
The screen's no window, but a shabby door
With students, spinsters staring through the hole
At what, if they were useful, they'd see W'hole.

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Students and specialists, earnest in their wav,

Thinking a peasant's pamphlet's meant for such as they,

Accepting this, because they do NOT know.

As the best the educational film can show.

They've got their magic lantern, and like the marm

They're out against, don't see that it can harm

If it's allowed to teach its lessons badly.

Brain — brain reform is what is needed, sadly.

But no, perhaps not. If this is what they do,

It's something brain and taste must not go through.

Reform's a form of canning. Sex is tinned,

Free and preserved, but stale. We need the wind

And earth between it (leaves in season's Fall)

And life to embrace it, not a concert-hall.

Love's better as it is " — that from the Co'gress.
Giggly? No, giddy, dear. We've made SUCH progress.

Norma Mahl.

^'THE AMATEUR CONVENTION"

The National Convention of Amateur Cinematograph
Societies which was held in London at the end of October
achieved certain positive results which should materially help
in strengthening and developing the amateur movement in
Britain.

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Chief among the decisions arrived at by the delegates was
the resolution to establish a central body to which all amateur
societies can afifiliate. Each afifiliated society wWl have one
or more representatives, according to strength, on the
General Council of the central body.

An immediate plan of work was arranged for the central
organisation. It was decided to establish a film librarv,
each society which- places one film at the disposal of the
library receiving one film from every other society doing
the same. In this w^ay every local societv will be able to
study the work of all the other amateur societies.

Under the control of the central body a technical bureau
is to be formed, which will advise and help the afifiliated
societies on all technical matters relating to their work.
Other decisions arrived at were to establish Amateur
Films as the official organ of the movement, to make the
National Convention an annual event, and to organise a
national scenario competition. The convention also decided
to commence a campaign aiming at the exclusion from import
duty of all films on sub-standard stock.

Delegates from some twenty societies were represented
at different stages of the Convention, including represen-
tatives from a number of provincial societies. The
programme of the Convention was interesting and usefuL
After the delegate sessions in the morning demonstrations
of different kinds of apparatus, film stock, etc., w^ere given,
followed in the evenings by papers and discussions on various
aspects of the amateur movement, and the projection of
amateur productions.

The greatest fault of the Convention, however, was

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its failure to work out a definite function for the amateur
movement. What path is the amateur movement to tread?
Is it to imitate Hollywood? Is it to follow blindly the box-
office ideas of the professional studios ? Or is it to work out
a theory and practice of its own which will be as different
from the average professional conception of the Cinema as
chalk is from cheese ?

In other words, will the amateur regard the Cinema as a
toy or as a serious, intelligent art ?

These are questions which the Convention did not satis-
factorily answer. In so far as thev were answered by the
films submitted for the competitions, the prospect is not
encouraging.

Three films may be taken as illustrations. First, The
Rejuvenation of Reggie, by the Newcastle Society. Here
was a perfectly futile production with baronial halls as the
background, and the people who are supposed to live in them
as the characters. And yet Newcastle is right in the heart
of the Durham and Northumberland coalfields, and sur-
rounded by shipyards and engineering factories. A giant
industrial district, affording an enormous wealth of human
material which the professional never dreams of tapping.
Yet the Newcastle Society apparently ignores all this, and
has to waste good film stock on material which is valueless.
They have for their work a field rich in possibilities, and
they don't take it.

The Emperor' s Sapphire, by the Southport A.C.A. is yet
another example of what not to do. Three perfectly good
reels of film wasted on the sort of blood-and-thunder stuff
Hollywood did ten times better ten years ago. Similar

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criticism could be levelled at the five reel Thanet A.C.A.
production, The Secret of the Tunnel, in which the customary
story of dope fiends, dope smugglers, shots in the dark, secret
service agents and detectives is chosen. While all praise is
due to much of the astonishingly good lighting and photo-
graphic effects — particularly in the interior sets — does the
Thanet A.C.A. really think that The Secret of the Tunnel
will help the amateur movement in any way at all to do some-
thing really worth while?

The decision of the Convention to organise the scattered
forces of the amateur was all to the good ; so also was the
growing realisation that the amateur must aim at working
with standard instead of sub-standard stock; but of greater
importance than these is the imperative necessity for the
amateur societies to sit down and think what thev are going
to do.

Stolen sapphires, dope smuggling and train wrecks are not
the sum total of mankind's experiences. These are trivial
occurrences. But, there are a million unemployed in Britain ;
there is intense povertv and vast weakh existing side by side;
there are appalling slums and luxurious mansions ; there are
gigantic social conflicts ; every other week or so (as Mr,
Herring once pointed out) we read of pit disasters which
shatter the lives of men and women. Do these things mean
nothing to the amateur ?

Go to any mining village, go to the textile centres in
Lancashire and Yorkshire, to the slums of Glasgow, to the
docks and w^harves in the East End of London, and there you
will find raw, human living material, material for countless
cinema epics.

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Here is a field for the amateur which will make him the
equal of the professional, despite the financial and technical
wealth of the movie trusts.

R. Bond.

A CERTIFICATE OF APPROVAL

We bought an English Newmann Sinclair camera and
twenty-four pounds' worth of film, in London. We held
English passports. And we sailed from Immingham on an
EngHsh steamer, bound for Iceland and Spitzbergen.

We did not sleep one night away from the boat during our
entire trip so that we might almost claim technically not to
have left British soil. But we photographed some Icelandic
seals and the coast line of Spitzbergen. So if we had
declared our film in the ordinary manner on our return to
Immingham, we should have had to pay roughly fifty pounds
in duty on the twentv-four pounds' worth of negative.

So we applied for a certificate of approval.

It will never happen again. I always disliked smuggling,
but I have had my lesson. Honesty does not pay.

It took two letters, a personal visit to the Customs depart-
ment, the production of evidence that we were British citizens
and several telephone calls, to obtain the certificate before

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sailing. (Warning : at least ten days should be allowed for
the task.)

Our film was packed, sealed, and a mysterious sealed en-
velope handed to us, to be given to the Customs officer before
sailing.

The first hitch occurred when he could not be discovered
and we almost lost the boat, looking for him.

We cruised North and exposed the film. Then we re-
turn to England.

The Customs official was there when we landed. He
could not be persuaded that we had not bought the film in
Norway. He confiscated our certificate of approval and the
film and we came to London with the foolish hope of securing
a commercial success by showing two reels of " ICE " in a
heat wave. It was on Julv 25th.

Between July 25th and September 11th the following
incidents occurred : —

1. We wrote ten letters to the shipping agents handling-
articles for the Bonded ^^^arehouse.

2. Gave a bond for £137 Os. Od., which they estimated
was the value of the film. Actually, as we had no
contract for exhibition, it was worth only twenty-four
pounds the cost of the negative.

3. Filled up three forms.

4. Gave full particulars of our life history and a cheque
for expenses to the shippers of £1 2s. 7d.

5. Were told it would be sent to the Bonded Warehouse,
who w^ould notify us in writing of its arrival.

6. Waited ten da vs.

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7. Telephoned Bonded Warehouse who first reproached
us for not having claimed it previously and
then refused to move further in the matter until the
certificate of approval was forthcoming, which thev
admitted had been lost at the Customs. After we
had waited still another four days and written once
more to shippers it was discovered.

8. We were ordered to attend at the Bonded Warehouse
with' two householders.

9. We looked for two householders (not an easv
job when attendance had to be made during business
hours) and arrived at Bonded Warehouse.

10. The two householders each gave a bond for thirty-
five pounds that we were not habitual criminals and
would not steal the film during process of
development.

11. We were sent to Camden Town from Endell Street
to pay one pound at the office there as fee for atten-
dance of officer to break seals before the film could
be developed.

12. We returned to Endell Street, deposited passport
photographs as proof of identity and were permitted
to take the box of film in a taxi to the developing firm.
This was an agonising journey for we were warned
as we left the Bonded Warehouse that if the seal got
broken we should be liable, together with the house-
holders, for heavy fines or imprisonment. The taxi
seemed more reckless and the seal more fragile every
minute of the trip. We suggest it as ideal material

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for a comic — or a tragic — scenario. It is not, how-
ever, to be commended for the nerves of the actors.

13. Telephoned attendance officer at Charing Cross Road
that film had been developed and made arrangements
that film had been deposited and made arrangements

14. We were notified that the film had been developed
and returned to Bonded Warehouse.

15. We attended at Bonded Warehouse and were sent
with a paper to Camden Town.

16. Paid the duty at Camden Town of three pounds one
shilling.

IT. We returned to Endell Street with receipt and paid
eleven and sixpence warehouse charges.

18. We were then permitted to remove film on September
26th, exactly two months after we had landed at
Immingham.

The reason given for all these elaborate precautions was
that we might have hired an American star to come from
Hollywood and be photographed in a bathing suit against
Icelandic cliffs.

We were told that most of the English film companies,
even when entitled to a reduction of duty, pay the full amount
rather than deal with the unending complexities of a certi-
ficate of approval and it is even rumoured that a cameraman
who accompanied an English explorer, spent so long
in getting his film released at the finish, that the explorer
had made another journey, so that the film was no longer
of topical interest.

But it seems absurd for English people to have to pay
the full rate of fivepence a foot (which gives immediate

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possesion of the negative) on film bought in England and
brought back to be developed. And it must surely be
harmful to the industry. There are, for instance, some
excellent English cinema cameras, but who is going to buy
one when it can never be taken abroad? The big film
companies pay the full duty and take what they want away.
It is the scientist making a record of little or no commercial
value who is penalized by these petty regulations.

If it is required to retain them, why cannot they be
simplified? Why cannot the smaller rate of duty be paid
immediately bv those travellers in possession of a certificate
of authority, at the port of landing. Or if the film must
be seen at the Bonded Warehouse, why cannot it be sent
direct from the port to a firm for developing without the six
or seven weeks delay, while it is sent from Customs to
Customs? And again, why cannot all payments be made
at Endell Street, instead of having to take eacli paper to
Camden Town and back ?

Without organisation little is possible but this is surely
a matter for all film societies in England. There is a move-
ment to obtain exemption from duty of sub-standard stock.
But standard stock is essential for the scientist and the
experimental film society and while it may be necessary to
impose a small duty (though this is questionable) at least
steps should be taken to make the payment of it immediate
and to obviate, in the interests of the industry in general,
as well as of the traveller, these annoying and hampering
restrictions and delays.

Bryher.

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TURKSIB

One could say " here is a beautiful film " but would that
answer? One could say "here is slickness, invention,
innovation, carried to its logical conclusion One could
add * ' plus ingenuity '\ There would 'still be left untabulated
the chief ingredient. Take sHckness, ingenuitv, invention,
innovation — polish them. At one time vou might have
achieved a \''enus with a silver belly, at another period of
innovation, a German helmet. Take the two; melt, smelt,
re-weld. You get something quite new, quite different, a
new form, not so much gro^^ ing out of the old, as projected
from it, not so much the fruit of the blossom as some new
substance that is neither fruit nor blossom vet indisseverable
from both fruit and blossom and the original tree stock.
Take the new art-form. It has nothing to do with sculpture
nothing to do with music. Take Turksib,

I like Turksib/' Turksib is the name of a railwav,
Turkistan-Siberia, or the name of a particular engine if vou
prefer it. Turksib anyhow has personable dimension. Take
any railway, from time immemorial and recall w^hat vou can
of it. For myself, there is a series of deplorable mid-
Victorian images, the little blue engine stamp that appeared
on one's grandfather's old letters, a print of a gentleman in

*A Vostik-Kino film, directed by V. Turin.
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peg'-top trousers and a ladv in a crinoline, a deplorable toy
engine steaming out from somewhere, toward something.
Modernized, this becomes Buster Keaton and The General.

Buster Keaton and The General humanized the railway,
made personifiable a certain raihvav and a particularized 1860
(or to be exact 1864ish) sort of engine. The General made
us laugh — so much for The General. The General emerged,
a personified engine, a character, standing out among count-
less meaningless memories of film engines that crash and
smash, that swerve, and curve, that creak and break, that
jug-jug-jug across prairies and the veldt, and puff-puff-puff
obligingly into stations to crash, for instance, into the mild-
eyed Greta Garbo with the somewhat unrecognisable attributes
of Anna Kerenina.

There was another engine into which Conrad \^eidt also
walked the other day, speaking actually into its verv nose.

Emmeline " was what he was saying (or " Eveline
With the exception of The General these engines oddlv had
no personality in spite of or because of the very " engines
of wrath " which thev presumablv svmbolised. Anna
Kerenina wronged her engine, so did Conrad A^eidt his,
actually having the temeritv — a talkie — to address it. Yet
" Emmeline " after all, when one comes to think of it, is not
at all a bad sort of name for that particular sort of maligned
film engine.

Humanity has been maligned, so why not, vou mav well
ask, an engine ? Well, whv not ? Perhaps we never realised
hoW' badly humanity in general had suffered at the hands of
the film-producers until we saw it dignified, humanised, re-
habilitated in our first " real " films. There is no use going

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back to Joyless Street, certain phases of Jeanne Xey, and the
first prodig'v of Mother. We know there that people moved,
acted, sufi'ered, we might almost say for the first time, not
parodies of people, at best ghosts, but spirits. Living spirits
moved with a suavitv and despair that no stage since has ever
given us. We saw decisively that the stage had crippled
A'ision.

Take thought. Take thought for its own sake. Sav " I
will personify, I will dramatise." The cube projected, the
flight of fancv that inverts the skyscraper and balances the
sardine tin in pseudo-geometric frenzy on a superimposed
series of translucent shoe-horns, is not (obvious truism) a
svmptom so much of dimensional as of demented psychology.
Yet we had to have shoe-horns, had for a time to accept the
beauty of the parallel planes of the sardine-tins, had our-
selves to gvrate and jibber thus-wise just to see how things
looked upside down and to convince ourselves we weren't
missing anvthing. Take Tiirksib.

We have here what we knew all the time was here. We
knew of course as well as anA^bodv that the sardine-tin wasn't
final. \A^e knew the shoe-horn didn't mean anything,
Avasn't even a personable shoe-horn. We knew as well as
anybodv that eventually the Pickford must shear her curls,
like auA' Iphigenia, on the altar of her immolation.

Well, East is East and West is West and never the twain
shall meet, did and had to do (like the fabulous, romantic
Pickford Golden Fleece) for an older generation. But " all
things flow," we are told. Thought is never static. It
creeps, it seeps, it craAvls in just where you don't expect it.
Whv Russia, a'ou mav well ask, whv Soviet Russia ?

490

A beautiful example of photographic
the filming of Pabst's White Hell of
with Dr. Arnold Fanck

art, by Hans Casparius, taken during
Piz Palii, a film made in conjunction
in the Swiss mountains.

A Hans Casparius composition, taken during the filming of IXIetzner's
Whei'e's Love There's Da?2ger.

A new ]\Ian With a Alovie Camera. Hans Casparius again is responsible
for this vigorous study of Eduard von Borsody. In our next issue we
^vill devote an article to the work of Casparius in photography and film.

The Glittering Szconi (see Ccmment and Review)— sl film new made
by Ronald Gow with the boys of Altrincham School.

Turksih (Turkestan-Siberian Railroad). See article of that name in

this issue.

The Rose of Pu Chui. One of the striking posters designed
by Lapthorn, who uses a method of pictorial criticism.'*
Her work has aroused considerable attention, and has gained
the wide admiration it deserves.

A " pictorial criticism " of Broadway, By Lap thorn.

CLOSE UP

Thought was ever the hberated, it never acted, never
functioned except in freedom. It is permeable, permanent,
(Hke Hsts in the old Orphic Hymn, one could go on almost
forever) indivisable, indestructable. That personified Lady
stands (or stood) outside the portals of Delphi in the old
days. Stood there, for artistic creation is nothing, no
acceptable sacrifice " without intellectual habiliments.
Take Turksib,

Just why? Well, we have subtlety, innovation, polish,
real and singular cool beauty — Turksib, a railway, an engine,
seems a being almost in this film, god or goddess, having
power to inspire awe, love, a subtle innovation, the very silver
belly of Venus and the helmet of modernized Mars, welded,
a thing of destruction, of creation. Not created, just
adequately made, healing our avid, overstrained nerves
(appearing after that terrible Aescuylean " creation "
Arsenal) with exquisite finality. Here you have a film of
a railroad, of the making of an engine, perfect in nuance of
superimposition, drawing-board traceries, abstraction of
T-square and ruler and numerical statistics, dotted lines.

Thought," one wanted to shout aloud, is here for the
first time adequately projected," just as one wanted to shout
aloud in Joyless Street, here for the first time are people
These are not images made artificially but thought itself,
seen for the first time, in actal progression.

These im^ages are not projected after they have been
manufactured. We watch thought itself, thought-progres-
sion, not man's thought truly, but the subtle silver-thought
of some Hellenic trickster.

Hermes tricked, lied, hid, flew, walked, played a flute and

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a h're. He was not primarily an artist, not the fiery creator,
not the suave ph}'sical creator, but a trickster, a daemon.

Silver and cold and beautiful we seem to be watching

the super-thought of some such god, throughout this film,
from the first breaking up of the ground in the deep hot low
plains of Turkestan back to the draughtman's board, again
to the desert and the mountains. Desert and mountains
merge into the cool poise of a master-pencil, pen, map and
transparent paper, dotted lines, geometric abstraction, wheels
of the future line of carriages, bits of metal in precise pattern,
again fields and caravans. Sledges of the far divergent
Siberian frontiers of the same plan, the snow and the sledges
melt in exquisite superimposition on to apparently the same
dazzling silver-white, but here, desert-sand. \^ision sweeps,
we move, invisible, are ourselves gifted with invisibility and
wear about our worthless ankles the verv sandal straps of
the god ^Messenger. We are ourselves almost too deeply
involved with the beautv and the miracle of sheer thought
transfiguration to realize what a stride forward art has taken,
film art if you wish to deride and to deify that much maligned
abstraction.

H. D.

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MOVIE: NEW YORK NOTES

I shall not speak of Hollywood in these notes, except as
it refers to my province, New York. I believe it is time the
movie found other locales. Perhaps the talkie will help thai .
Paramount has a studio at Astoria on Long Island, within
greater New York, and Mr. Monta Bell, who was educated
with Charlie Chaplin, is director. That is still Hollvwood
in derivation, but Mr. Rouben Mamoulian, who directed
Porgy for the Theatre Guild, has made a film at Astoria,
Applause^ and Mr. Mamoulian may be included in our New
York school.

Not only I have felt the need for another school than
Hollywood. Sven Gade, returning to Europe from the
western Paradise, declares : That just as it was inevitable
that the movie should have sought the sun of California,
it is now^ essential that it return to the east. It is now too
far from the cultural, critical center of American life." You
may read the full story in Der Querschnilt, January 1929.

I have not yet seen Applause^ but in subsequent Notes I
shall tell you what I think of it. In the meantime I am
quoting from the words of Mr. Monta Bell the supervising-
director of the studios, and from those of Mr. Rouben
Mamoulian, director of the film itself. The comments of the

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two men are very interesting and very enlightening, if not
entirely noyel to the readers of Close Up, who haye not just
begun to hear about the contrapuntal organization of sound
and sight in the " audible film," as our New York reyiewers
now call the talkies. But these obseryations comxing from
America may promise something. Therefore, I take the
trouble and liberty of quoting them.

Monta Bell writes in the Motion Picture (September)
number of the Theatre Arts Monthly on The Director
in relation to the new compound cinema. He says : I feel
like an amateur in my own business. . . I belieye that the
director of silent pictures is far in adyance of his brother
director of stage-productions, as we both approach his new
medium. . . At the time I came East I did not like talking
pictures. I do not like them to-day. . . If some one
company had the courage — perhaps it would haye taken a
yery rash courage — to hold aloof from the hysteria that
brought these things about so rapidly — to produce only
silent pictures during the year, I am not sure but that they
might haye found a considerable market for these same silent
pictures. Howeyer, that is past. Talking pictures are here
and here to stay." Mr. Bell came East though he disliked
sound — not a happy confession, but most talkies seem to haye
been made by people who disliked them — and ^Nlr. Bell had
seyeral theories : that a talkie was still a moyie, that sound
and speed used to enhance the moyie was the right way for
the talkie. He quotes from an article written a year
preyiously for The North American Revie-n^ which he is all
the more conyinced is accurate. In that article he said :
" . . . that which the eye sees is the chief attraction of the

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screen." An image held too long for the sake of sound
is tedious; the screen should be made "continuously
interesting." Directors are recognizing this. Bell suggested
a year ago a number of devices now being used whose in-
tention is not the synchronization of the sound with the issuer
of the sound, but of sound from one source with an image
not issuing the sound ; in other w^ords, non-coincidence of
sound and image. He points out in his current article that
directors now know it isn't the thing to have too much
speech. He points to Applause as an instance of the correct
compound : no unnecessarv speech, dialogue and sound
effects for the movement of the film. Bell sees the director
as a writer, making his own transcription ; and the writer who
can manage people, he recognizes as a potential director.

Rouben Mamoulian has this to sav about his film
Applause : " The picture that you will see is an exam.ple of
the perambulating camera along with the ordinarv use of
the microphone, an instrument that is not as yet a selective
earpiece. . . I lifted the sound-proofed camera off its feet
and set it in motion on pneumatic tires. Scenes moved out
of one room and into others without halt. I tried to intro-
duce what I call counterpoint of action and dialogue."
(This idea will not be new to the readers of Close Up, however
novel it maA' seem to readers of The Xe-a: York Times.)

The camera flew, jerked, floated and rolled, discarding its
stubborn tripod-legs for a set of wired wheels that raced
over the studio floors. ^ = . ;

" The camera here becomes descriptive in a new sort of
way. Where a break in the ordinary film to allow for a
close-up has been the modus operandi. I now guide my

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lens along a straight and continuous line, without breaks in
continuity, without needless explanatory speeches and also
sans the printed subtitle.

" As in music, I have tried to attain counterpoint in the
film. Not alone in the action on the screen, but in sound.
For example, when the mother bends over the child singing
it to sleep ... the camera leaves her for a moment and goes
to the head of the child, who . . . whispers her prayer. . .
Two unconnected sounds heard at the same time, that form
a melodious whole.

" I have also tried to keep design in mind. There
is always one force in motion played against another, and
the camera rises and falls to catch the decorative element
whether still or in motion.

" The camera then becomes an invisible spectator.

" By carefully timing the sequences and exercising stop-
watch precision in rehearsing the cast, I believe I have a
completed film that needs but a minimum of cutting."

Gilbert Seldes, our critic emeritus of the movie-as-art,
writes in Harper's for September on " Talkies Progress " :

" Not one of the talkies shown by midsummer, 1929, is
worth a minute of any intelligent person's time. In them-
selves, that is. A number of them are good enough
entertainment because they are transpositions to the screen
of good stage melodrama or of good musical shows ; some
are good entertainment in the accidental moments when they
remain movies. But as a self-contained, self-sufficient form
they are wholly negligible and are worth consideration only
because they are beginning to show signs of knowing what
direction they want to take. Up to the present they have

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lived on borrowed material ; and the trouble with living on
the energies or emotions of others is that one doesn't live."
The general sense of Mr. Seldes' epitome is accurate even
if the analogy in the last sentence is amiss. If the sound
film finds something that can be borrowed and incorporated
that is its prerogative. Mr. Seldes objects to the early
practice of focusing the camera on the throat or gullet of
the speaker; he objects to it as unpleasant — why so finicky?
— and because it doesn't permit us to see the voice's effect
on the other characters. He says that now directors know
they do not need to locate the voice by isolating the speaker.
Seldes, like the logician that he is, says that in the nature
of the instruments lay the answer to the problem — the stability
of the microphone, the activity of the camera. But the
microphone need not be immobile. The points upon the
talkie which Mr. Seldes makes I have previously considered
and presented in these pages. These points refer to the
apparent non-synchronization, surmountable (though the
writer does not say so) by the very camera-concentration to
which he objects. As to the aesthetic necessities that " the
art of cutting the new films has yet to be developed," and

a convention of speech must be effected." I must say
that Mr. Seldes sounds like a weathercock. I have myself
in Close Up, not merely expressed the needs for these instru-
ments of the compound film, but have recorded tentative
methods for the realization of the needs. And more await
publication in these pages. It is true, Mr. Seldes says some
theorists have expressed possible methods, but his summary
is at this date a little behind times.

Simultaneous with this article of Mr. Seldes appears his

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book on The Movie and the Talkies. It is of necessity a brief
book, and one must acknowledge that the author has done
a good job. Indeed, I know of no one else who could
remember to say as much as he has contained in the volume.*
It is a pocket critical-history of the American film, despite
tangential references to films elsewhere. Mr. Seldes might
have carried out the work even more effectively had he placed
stresses (in the sense of length of passages) more judiciouslv.
He begins : The moving picture is an illusion. It is also
an industry." He spends a number of pages on the evidences
of the illusion, implying that the illusory nature of the cinema
differentiates it basically from the other arts. But — is not
painting an illusion? Is not literature an illusion? Is paint
any more a reality than the static image? Is a picture formed
of paint any more a reality than a motion made of static
images ? But beyond this is another question : the illusion
that becomes the reality of art (the reality of imparted
experience) is not the illusory physical basis of the medium,
but the organization which we call performance. + Mr. Seldes
has tried to concentrate into his slim volume the movie's
technical foundations, its commercial history (which he might

* This little book is crowded with the various phases of the motion
picture. At times Mr. Seldes is eloquent in his condensations, viz :
" . . . the movies can annihilate space and show the aggressors, the
victims and the rescuers ; it can subdivide time and multiply suspense ;
it can give the maximum of threat and of fear and hold them to the
last fraction of intensity before it gives the maximum of joy." This
arises out of a reference to an early Griffith film.

+ The confusion here is of the illusion of the origins with the illusion
of the expression. The latter, while it relates to the former, is in a
category, not isolated, but singular. That is, it does not depend solely
nor — after being created — much upon its origins, it has its own peculiar

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have packed into a couple of lines — " It was born in the
laboratory and reared in the counting-house."), and the
aesthetic development and principles. There are films made
strictly upon the physical basis of the film : the animated
cartoon, etc., but these are not the most important of the
cinematic forms. ]\Iontage is, in a rudimentarv sense, this
physical basis of the film. But to build up a syllogism
leading to a law of cinematic aim upon the premise of the
film's illusory nature is to make the mere material rudiments
the complete aesthetic experience. This has been an
American error among the aesthetes of the cinema. Mr.
Seldes does not make, however, the full mistake of being
literal as was Mr. Matthew Josephson. He recognizes the
American blunder that saw action as motion. I have put it
before in these words : Cinema movement is not simple
recorded motion, it is organized motion (rhythm). Seldes
is wise enough to observe that the American folk-film is
rudimentary but not realized, and the reason for this is not
the crass and stupid commercialism — which Seldes rightly
indicates has proven its ignorance before the tribunal of
actual developments, which has vindicated the aesthetician

"expyerience to impart. Mr. Seldes, by his reasoning from the illusory
basis of the cinema, concludes that the chief error has been the over-
emphasis of the actual side," that the cinema's " essential quality has
been put aside in favor of an incidental." Still, the " actual " — the
incidental, the factual — has been a source for the development of the
essential : the newsreel and the romantic documentary, for instance ;
the nev/sreel and the Russian montage-film ; the newsreel and Potemkin.
The essential quality of any art subsists and survives against odds.
These odds are the materials — obstacles if you will — to be mastered and
converted. All art is victory and every artist, despite his beliefs, must
be an optimist in so far as his art is concerned.

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— but the congenital rudimentary and literal-mindedness of
the American cinema, too expressive of the American non-
creative mentality. It is because of this bred-in-the-bone-
and-blood limitation that I urge a New York cinema. The
Hollywood film-colony is a vested interest community of
phlegmatic imaginations and a circle of imitations. When I
think of the reader of Mr. Seldes' book, I accept Mr. Seldes'
reiterations of erstwhile axioms which by now are platitudes.
No one in America — or very few — read serious critiques of
the cinema. People have had to be told that the movie is
not a hybrid, despite reference to other arts. Still, Mr.
Seldes might have stressed certain qualifications such as :
while the movie is not a mobilized sculpture or painting, and
while it was a confusion that considered the movie an
" electrical theatre," the unawareness of other mediums is no
guarantee of a unique motion picture art. This qualification
should further stress that no longer do we need to think of
a particular theme as cinematic or not, if there is the artist
who can convert it into cinema. The entire experience of
mankind belongs to the film as it belongs to every other art,
and mankind's graphic experience (painting and sculpture)
can inform the structure of the motion picture. I repeat
myself to the readers of Close Up, because this statement of

sources " is most important in a land whose cinema is
literal and matter-of-fact.

It is this literal mind which explains the fact that Mr.
Seldes correctly states : there has been no development
beyond Griffith in composition. Only the American comedy
has got to any distance beyond rudiments. It is not Chaplin
alone who extended the rudiments. Indeed, it can barely be

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said that Chaplin is the extension of the American movie.
Though he derives somewhat from Mack Sennett and — Seldes
forgets — Max Linder, he is more vaHdly the extension of the
EngUsh music-hall and, to an even greater extent, the
development of himself. Much nearer to America in
structure and temper are films like: Hands Up! with
Raymond Griffith, and A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court, from the Mark Twain novel. Ghaplin the
personality is perfection, but he is not the sole realization
of performance in the cinema. For the actor is not the
achievement of the film — Mr. Seldes will agree to that, I
know. If in America the film has not been fully realized
it is only because the director has been unable to realize it,
and this goes as much for Ghaplin as director of his own
comedies (yes, and of A Woman of Paris, too) as for Griffith
and Sennett and the lesser men, including Mr. Seldes'
favourite King Vidor.J

Seldes very soberly and with some courage meets the
Russian film and is not rhapsodic over it. But he fails to
name its cardinal fault : it is a perfection and elaboration of
the American physical method, a thousand times superior

I Mr. Seldes wishes his text to culminate in two queries, the first of
which is : Why has no figure comparable to Chaplin in slapstick comedy
appeared in any of the other types of the movie? I have answered this
query in my own w^ay above but I wish to add, that if Mr. Seldes means :
figures comparable in their understanding of the nature of film
performance (and that should be the question, not degree of excellence),
I offer Werner Krauss, Asta Nielsen and the maligned Catherine
Hessling. If he means directionally, I submit the Victor Seastrom of
Swedish Biograph, Eisenstein, Dreyer. Frankly the " cult of Charlie
Chaplin " needs some investigation. As for Mr. Seldes' enthusiasm
for Vidor, it is not so exacting as his judgment usually requires.

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to the latter, but unsuited to a material more inferential, more
social-minded, more profound than the usual American con-
tent. With all his urge to transcend the literal, Griffith
was also held back by the experience of the American impact-
film and as ultimate experience his films never attained to
more than sententiousness and a poesie " which was
reflected in the false and tedious restraint of a Lillian Gish
or a Mae Marsh, whom Mr. Seldes sentimentally remembers.

Mr. Seldes does not venture into a discussion of
categories of the film w^hich might lead him to consider forms
out of the immediate range of the American experience. He
does not treat at all of the future film, the psychically inten-
sive, whose first and probably archetypical utterance is
Dreyer's Jeanne d^Arc. He repeats the objection he has
contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the close-up,
confusing its banal and sentimental effect-use in the
American film with its intrinsic offering as a rhythmic
employment or bold imagery for intensiveness (where it
ceases being a close-up). He will not talk of the stereoscopic
film — because he has not seen one — save to condemn it as
false realism. Of course, it need not be that any more than
sound is only extraneous duplication, simply because the
practicians have no minds beyond the literal. §

* * *

§ He blunders somewhat rankly in referring to rhetorical uses of
instrument as tricks." And a correction: Entr'acte is usually
accredited to Ren6 Clair and not to Man Ray, as Seldes assigns it ;
and the film of Chomette's was sponsored, not made by de Beaumont.
A last tribute : Close-Up is referred to twice in the little book (which by
the way costs $1.00), once as " fascinating." Dorothy M. Richardson
is quoted.

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The New York movie has individual articulation in
the work of a few independent artists. The first of these
whose film I have seen are Watson and Webber. They
have made a short cinematization of Poe's The Fall of the
House of Usher. It is done under the impetus of the French
school of the multiple-image, with prismatic multiplication
of an image, gelatinous construction, limpid movements,
sustained fluid rhythms. The technique of it is quite pro-
fessional, but the effect is broken by two intrusions : first
the amateurishness of the players (fantastic stylization is the
severest test of the player) and the presence of solid forms
in a contained structure of gelatinous, obscure, imper-
sonalized, sheer, non-solid forms. Solidity defeats the mood
and the visual apprehension of the digits in the film's collec-
tive symbolism. This is a film too brief and too intense to
permit of a dual structure. The characters should never appear
as human entities in a world of solid affairs, such as food.
There is no quotidienal reality in the transparency of this
Usher-world as Watson and Webber establish it and the
establishment of such a non-human world denies (particularly
since the unit is so brief) anything beyond it that can be
seen with morning-eyes through no intermediate eye of
gelatine and collapse.

The film is creditable, but we must not exaggerate its
achievement. It is important as a capable independent
effort, and as an indication of an interest in the non-literal
in America. But how important will such enterprise be to
the realization of a new American movie ? To me the new
cinema will build with the healthy rudiments of the film we

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have so far effected. We have our mythology, our legend,
our lore, our folk-film. That is our source.

I suppose the question will be asked : how does this film
compare with Epstein's Usher-film? I say first: there is
no similarity. Then I say : Epstein's is more profound, it
achieved a complete and precise sense of universe-torment.
The American film remains with me as an excellent achieve-
ment in physical materials. It does not impress as a psychical
experience. I feel no transcendence in the use of the physical
materials. The enthusiasm for it — and it deserves dis-
interested praise — is due to the weariness among appreciative
sensiblities of the world of the American film which will not
venture in the sheer nor in the more delicate utilization of
the film's instruments.

One critic has preferred the American Usher-film to the
French and has dismissed the latter as using age-old (as age
goes in cinema history) devices like rising mists. And why
not, pray? Devices like words are determined by their
affiliations in a definite unity. The mists are integral in the
Epstein film and they allow his penetrating camera the
scrutiny his film demands. A new device does not make a
new film ; an old device does not make a film out-of-date or
trite.

* * *

The readers of Close Up will recall my words on
the olfactory cinema. I discover in the September 3rd, 1917
Artcraft Advance, issued by the Artcraft Pictures, a division
of the Paramount at that time, these words by Douglas
Fairbanks : There is now on foot a scheme to suggest
sentiment or emotions by odours and perfumes. There is

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an odour for every emotion if it can only be discovered. A
certain Italian is now working on a symphony of odours.
You know how you associate an odour with some place.
Heliotrope for instance has a w^onderful effect on me.
Should a symphony of odours be scientifically developed we
may get as much from it as from sight. They will be able,
in conjunction with what you see on the screen, to shoot out
an odour into the auditorium which will produce the same
effect as sad music such as Beethoven used to play. Belasco
tried it when he used incense in the Darling of the Gods/'

* * ♦

Mr. Ralph Steiner is a Xew York artist of photography. He
has made a film, H20, w^hich has won the Photoplay amateur
prize. I have not yet seen the film but I hasten to record
this victory which may be significant of further independent
films. Or may not. Still, that an American mav be willing
to film such an untypical (from our fans' standpoint) subject,
one so pictorial, as water, is no small evidence of a new
attitude. Or is it an old attitude? Is this the influence of
Paris upon a mind essentially graphic in its interest? There-
fore, the Paris influence — traditional in American, and the
world's graphic art. But, you say and I agree, hadn't I better
wait until I see the film ? I assure you, my friends, I bear it
no prejudice. Only — I am remembering Philippe Soupalt's
good advice of some six years ago, that the American film
must not go aground the " antiquated novelties." It has its
own character to consummate.

Harry A. Potamkix.

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DENTAL DILEMMA

I have come back from the Chair again ; from the Dental
Chair sublime. From the forceps' way, and the gimlets'
way; with cocaine at a guinea a time.

Gaps; and the toothache's ended. It may have been mere
apprehension that did it. (" I am not going to hurt you;
much.") Or it may have been the fact that I had just been
initiated into Big Business and had lunched with a film
magnate. Will gossip writers please note? The lunch in
itself was an unqualified success. The talkies were here for
good. Soon we should have colour. And the Grandeur
Screen. The Big Man's company had the greatest line-up
of stars and directors ever assembled in a motion picture
studio.

Everything was for the worst in the worst of all possible
worlds.

Later, after reading stale magazines in the Waiting Room
I was in the Spirit. The inside dope on Hollywood, spilt by
the Big Man in direct ratio to the number of oysters which he
swallow^ed with a noise like the last pint of bath water running
out, formed symphonies of headlines in the old grey cells,
ran along the live wires of a number of vicious molars, and
formed themselves finally into a large pair of forceps which

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were photographed in three dimensions, four natural colours
and five crazy camera angles.

While in the Spirit, I dreamt, not unnaturalh', that I dwelt
in marble halls. Sitting back comfortably in what at first
seemed to be a Sedan chair, but which afterwards associated
itself more definitely with the lethal chamber, I was trans-
ported through the several realms of bliss, finally reaching an
immense hall, in which were seated hundreds of prominent
picture personalities, all looking more dignified, more pious,
than they usually look on earth.

Not quite aware how I got there, I found myself at the
same desk as Cecil B. De Mille, who was studiously reading
Pudovkin in the original. Nearby was Frank Borzage,
pretending to study a ponderous book while really reading a
novelette secreted under the ledge of the desk.

A studious class room. The British directors, in particular,
were diligently applying themselves to the task of learning
something about cinema. I noticed that despite the general
air of philosophic deliberation the class had its naughty boys.
Rex Ingram was studying a photograph of himself in a fan
magazine, and Lionel Barrymore was glancing through his
collection of Press cuttings.

Perhaps the most significant thing about the assembled
immortals, however, was their extreme innocence. ]\Ian
Ray, devoid of his earthly bulk, was leaning spirit-like over
a collection of geometric objects, continually experimenting
with their positions, something like a youngster being
initiated into the mysteries of building blocks.

The general hubbub of the Spirits, which emanated chiefly
from the Gerrhan quarter, where E. A. Dupont and Richard

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Eichburg were arguing as to whether or not Piccadilly was
real cinema, subsided as a white-clad figure wearing horn-
rimmed glasses took up his position on the lecturing
platform.

In readiness for the intellectual struggle awaiting them
gum was slipped into spirit-mouths, mouths which knew not
the aquaintance of forceps. Speaking with a voice re-
markably like Western Electric sound-on-film, the oracle
commenced to deliver his address. His tonsil tantrums
stabbed the air, for all the world like a hypodermic syringe
on an aching gum.

" At this point in the stream of causation, children," he
began, for there was obviously no morning or afternoon in
this lecture-hall, " I want you to consider the fundamentals
of cinema. Later, we will come to their application, but
before we can do that we must have a clear idea of the medium
with the use of which we have been graciously entrusted."

F. W. Murnau shuffled, a faint, spirit-shuffle.

" Now, children," continued the tonsils, " who can tell
me what cinema is? "

A thousand spirit minds were working furiously. Halos
of inspiration appeared and disappeared around the ghostly
heads.

" Please, Teacher," cried Carl Laemmle, Jnr., suddenly,
I know. Box-office."

A distant roar, which might have been either the Last
Trump or a Lleavenly traffic-block, sounded in the hall.

" The cinema," continued the oracle, warming into his
stride, and taking occasional sips of luke-w^arm nectar from
a glass at his elbow, is the oldest of the arts. It is so old,

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so mixed up with the primitive attempts at expression on the
part of pre-D. W. Griffith man, that people naturally assume
it is a new art. You will find, children, that people, particu-
larly critics, have an unfortunate habit of looking at
everything upside down. That explains the success of Ben
Hurr

" Now for a definition of cinema. . . The oracle

paused. All oracles avoid definitions. " Well, that is to
say, well. . . . Cinema may briefly be defined as a synthesis
of light, shade, and movement, a construction postulating
these three entities." The lecturer took a long gulp of
nectar and looked pleased that he had passed the first hurdle.

That definition, children, may mean something; I leave it
to you to find out. Write to the papers about it. They
should know.

" Having successful!}' decided upon our definiton, chil-
dren, we have to consider the relationship each part bears to
the other, and in turn, to the whole. And what part the whole
bears to each other. And to the other part of the whole.
After which we may dwell lightly on the relationship of the
other part of the whole to the remaining part of the part of
the whole.

" I take it that was quite clear? Let me repeat

Did you fully understand that. King Vidor? Hitchcock,
stop looking at those marble pillars as though you want to
run a camera all the way up them. It isn't done in the best
circles."

" Now, the synthesis of a picture, the building up of its
sequence, the visual relationship of its separate shots, the
calculated tonal and structural relationships of its individual

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compositions, and the relationship of those qualities with the
film as a whole, is called montage.

" Montage is the bete noir of the commercial cinema. For
the translation of that passage see the glossary at the end
of any popular dictionary. The actual word montage "
is of French origin, meaning, literally, mounting. According
to the number of pages any English journalist may fill in
describing the meaning of the word, so he is considered to
be mounting the intellectual ladder which leads ultimately to
irate news editors, low-brow letters about high-brow critics,
and the dole. You follow me? "

The Sage's discourse was suspended for awhile in order to
permit the feebly protesting ejection of a number of American
film magnates, who indignantly declared that they had never
heard of the word.

" Once upon a time there were a number of sensational
pictures made in Russia. They altered the face of the film
world, they shattered the fair idol known as Ufa. And
earnest people following in their wake mistook their means
as their end. Montage, with apologies to the British studios,
occupied the thoughts of the film-makers.

" But the result, unfortunately, was generally unhappy.
Their arose a circle of enthusiasts who mistook montage for
its spectacular constituent, quick cutting. There arose a
school, whose coat of arms was a pair of scissors, snipping.
More celluloid was wasted through Russian imitators
endeavouring to be clever than was ever wasted in
Hollywood.

''At a meeting of a certain film group, for example, a
young man who should have known better, presented a

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picture, which shall be nameless, and introduced it to the
audience with the remark that he added the montage after
making the picture. He seriously thought snip-snap cutting
and reverse printing gave him montage.

More than that, he mentioned casually that the printers
had accidentally reversed the negative in the wrong place,
but added that he did not think it affected the balance of the
picture.

He was right, children. It didn't."
Some consternation was caused at this juncture by an
alarming clanking noise, not unlike the clatter of surgical
instruments on enamel trays. It transpired, however, to be
nothing more sinister than the arrival of Lon Chaney,
disguised as a money-box. He was thereupon surrounded
by a number of half-starved British producers.

Having decided upon the things that make FORM in
a picture," drawled the Voice, hissing slightly like a disc
system in full blast, we have to consider subject matter.
Here opinions differ. The commercial cinema and the avant
garde — the latter being a curious collection of unwashed
animals who live in Chelsea, and the outskirts of all big cities
— ^can never agree."

Hollywood and Elstree, the places where they make
motion pictures, employ people who write what are known as
film stories. That means to say, they take the one eternal
story of the movies and twist it into a form they fondly think
is new."

*^ The eternal story is simply this; the Farmer's daughter
loves the Milkman, but the dirty Squire has a Mortgage on
ih'e old farm. He demands the hand — well, perhaps not

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exactly the hand — of the daughter in return for the deed.
Father, a weak fellow, who has never recovered from the
shame his Daughter's Mother brought on the Family, gives
in. But the Milkman turns up at the critical moment,
waving a £10,000 cheque won in an illegal Football
Competition. The Squire dies of drink and his bones turn
into particularly nasty maggots. The loving pair live on,
and thoughtlessly reproduce their species ad infinitum/'

" That, children, is the one and only commercial film story.
It contains all the ingredients of Box Office, and has been
moulded a thousand thousand times in the furnace. It has
everything ; Father-love, Mother-love, romance, comedy —
and how ! — pathos, and S.A. (South Africa, children, South
Africa)."

" Now, for those of you who have been nurtured in
Hollywood I have a somewhat painful surprise. Under-
stand," (here I was vaguely aware that I was sitting back
stiffly and yawning inelegantly) " I am not going to hurt
vou ; much."

" The Ideal film story is not literary-representational in
the conventional sense. The crazy idea that a film is only
a film by reason of its plot and counter-plot is as out of date
as the dental surgery of the ' one hand on the tongs and one
foot in the patient's chest ' school."

If you analyse the great pictures of the world you will
find they contain no plot, little incident, and only a thread-
bare sequence of events. Even in the commercial cinema
this dictum holds true. Witness the box-office success of
The Cock-Eyed World, a film with no story, but an alleged
theme."

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Mr. Raoul Walsh here rose and repeated the most famous
oral gag from his picture. He was promptly offered a plate
of fruit by an attendant dressed as a United States Marine.

The film with little literary value enjoys great advan-
tages over its more rigid rival. It has a cinematic freedom
denied in the narration of a conventional plot. But such
films do not succeed."

Mr. Stuart Davis here cried " Shame ! "

They do not succeed because they baffle their audience,
and audiences — particularly the British Audience — hate
being baffled. When people for the first time meet some-
thing which they can't understand, but think they should
be able to understand, they get angry. Their sense of defeat
vents itself on the w^ork which has defeated them. Give an
old lady a copy of Joyce's Ulysses and see what she says.
Particularly if she happens to open it at the last page."

" It does not do to anger the box-office, nor does it do to
infuriate the critics. Nobody really reads the critics except
the people whose names are mentioned favourably in the
criticism, but there is a popular opinion that they are demons
to be feared."

This matter of story-less picture making is much more
important than it appears at first sight. I shall make it the
subject for the next Earth-lesson, which I expect you to film
very carefully on nice, clean negative. And anyone not
doing his Earth-lesson will have to bring a note from his
executive saying why he hasn't done it."

Gravitational forces were pulling; zig-zag. Twisting
downw^ards, just like a tooth coming out.

That, children, will be all for to-day. Mr. Pudovkin,

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you shouldn't put your books away like that, so soon. You
may be head of the class, but it's very bad manners.
Remember what the English Press said about you when you
visited London. You may have a reputation to live up to
in that direction, but don't indulge in it here."

There was a sharp downward tug, and the Celestial Film
School grew dim.

Glancing round hurriedly before the Spirit entirely left
me I caught a glimpse of Cecil B. De Alille, and heard him
telling William Fox that this montage business was the bunk,
anyway, and that he personally believed in bedroom scenes.

A white-clad figure, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, was
chattering away amiably.

This new injection is remarkable stuff," he was saying.

So soothing to the nerves."

Hugh Castle.

L'ESPRIT MOYEN ET LE CINEMA

Levraut, en parlant de Moliere, disait deja : En effet, les
applaudissements des delicats ne suffisaient point a I'auteur,
il lui fallait aussi les pieces blanches du parterre pour faire
vivre sa troupe de comediens.

Primum Vivere deinde philosophari, et pour vivre, le
cinema organise commercialement doit atteindre avant tout

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I'esprit moyen. On ne saurait done trouver a redire aux
tendances banales des scenarios, a Tusage frequent d'ex-
pressions populaires.

Pen a peu, cependant, attires par ce qui, dans quelques
films, trahissait un talent incompletement standardise,
seduits par certains effets esthetiques, voulus ou non, les
esprits cultives, de toutes classes, vinrent au cinema. Ces
adeptes nouveaux, au meme titre que le tout-venant " ont
droit certes a quelques egards ; il serait bon que, de temps
a autre, surgisse une bande a leur portee, qui fortifie leur
foi naissante. Pour mieux satisfaire leurs gouts, ces
amateurs de substance cinegraphique se groupent ici et la en
petits clubs prives. La creation de ces associations n'est
pas toujours commentee en termes agreables, car le commun
aime a blamer qui s'ecarte de lui pour faire bande a part.
On accuse ces cinephiles de faire parade de sentiments
eleves, mais apres un triage prealable des snobs et des oisifs,
les Cine-clubs se trouveraient encore composes d'excellentes
natures qui ont cent fois raison de vouloir bien faire confiance
au cinema, au vu de promesses latentes. Ce n'est pas a
dire, vraiment, que les spectacles, ordinaires ne revelent
jamais de films reellement interessants, et, sous ce rapport,
Ton constate certainement une amelioration sensible de la
qualite des films projetes habituellement. II ne faudrait pas
non plus s'imaginer que toutes les bandes presentees en
seances privees soient des chefs-d'oeuvre d'inspiration
artistique . . loin de la. Dans ce domaine, comme dans les
autres, s'immiscent aux produits de la meilleure imagination
ceux dont certains esprits plus ambitieux d'etonner, d'ahurir
le bourgeois que d'exprimer avec sincerite, accouchent sans

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effort. Et s'il est necessaire de se garder des films creux ou
infiniment soporifiques, il n'est pas moins indispensable de
condamner les elucubrations de ceux qui, par le moyen des
pellicules, donnent libre cours a un lyrisme du plus douteux
acabit.

J'en arrive au cinema pur, ainsi denomme parce qu'il
exclut I'idee continue et se borne a eveiller des sensations
visuelles. Si ces sensations etaient elles-memes generatrices
d'idees, le cinema pur serait, a n'en pas douter, la chose par
excellence de Tamateur cinephile. Mais prenons La Coquille
et le Clergyman, La Marche des Machines, La Nuit
Electrique, Symphonie D'une Grande Ville, Etoile de Mer.
Que constatons-nous ? Le premier est un salmagondis de
visions originales, certes, mais ne renferme aucun motif dont,
non seulement I'esprit, mais I'oeil, puisse raisonnablement
se satisfaire. Le produit d'une imagination personnelle,
c'est vrai, mais ou le naturel de Timpression fait place a une
recherche d'expressions curieuses et inedites dont I'auteur
seul apprecie Tobjet. It n'est pas douteux qu'une lente
investigation des signes visuels ne puisse aboutir a une forme
ideale de la representation figuree de la vie, et, a cet egard,
Madame Germaine Dulac ne saurait etre blamee de vouloir
liberer I'image du scenario conventionnel pour ne la faire
servir qu'a suggerer intuitivement le sens de tels mouve-
ments, tels groupements de formes. Mais le caractere
abstrait de semblables procedes, s'il prete volontiers une
physionomie et des possibilites nouvelles au film, ne se peut
guere imposer tout au long d'un spectacle. Quand Ozep ou
Preobrashenskaja, pour illustrer mieux la pensee, ont recours
aux paralleles, aux symboles, Ton saisit instantanement que

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les " recettes cinegraphiques, non plus constamment
exploitees comme dans Jeanne d'Arc, de Dreyer, par
exemple, mais savamment mises a profit, concourent puissam-
ment a rharmonie et si la signification plus profonde de
Taction filmee. Les travaux d'avant-garde ne sont frequem-
ment que d'arides concentrations de moyens et d'intentions
personnels dont il serait aise, sans contredit, d'extraire de
precieuses indications, mais qui, pour les besoins de
I'attention, ne possedent ni la variete, ni rhomogeneite
necessaires.

Deslaw, lui, enregistre la course des bielles, le va-et-vient
des pistons, impressionne I'emulsion de ses films des lueurs
nocturnes des boulevards. Ce n'est la que I'A.B.C. du
metier, les rudiments de I'expression cinegraphique, mais il
n'est pas sans interet de commencer par la; tant d'autres,
delaissant le langage des choses, s'en vont accumulant les
productions sans relief, persuades qu'a eux seuls le sourire de
Dolly et Tuniforme d'lvan suffiront a produire le charme
d'une narration pressee d'en finir.

La Symphonic D^une Grande Ville serait une chose
excellente si Ton en supprimait le tiers et par la je veux dire
les multiples visions qui n'apportent aucun element frais de
curiosite visuelle. Et VEtoile de Mer, quoi qu'on en disc,
pietine sur place.

Poete ou philosophe, peintre ou analyste, le cinema, sous
ces quatre aspects, se doit avant tout de n'exprimer,
au moyen des images, que des id^es, des sentiments per-
sonnels. II se. doit surtout d'eviter la banalite et de ne
s'emparer des etres sensibles qu'en poursuivant, a travers la

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forme, la sincerite d'emotion. Cette sincerite la est propre-
ment artistique. Nous ne pouvons attendre du cinema
aucune revelation qui ne soit la manifestation d'une
personnalite, d'un caractere, et moins encore devons-nous
esperer de la production dite internationale. Beranger
aimait deja qu'un Russe soit Russe et un Anglais, Anglais.
Nous irons plus loin, en disant qu'il est necessaire que ce
Russe, cet Anglais la, s'abstiennent de tourner la manivelle
s'ils n'ont rien a dire. II est grand temps, n'est-ce pas, qu'a
la teinte neutre du film commercial se substituent les
colorations propres a chaque individu, nation, race. L'esprit
moyen du cinema, passe-partout commercial, que le sonore
aurait pu condamner, gagne encore du terrain grace a cette
invention. Nous aurons le film polyglotte qui s'en ira
vulgarisant d'un pole a Tautre un synchronisme franco-
americain ou germano-russe, nous aurons .... mais au fait
pourquoi prophetiser.

Freddy Chevalley.

COMMENT AND REVIEW

ADVANCED PICTURES ON VIEW.

One cannot help talking about the Shaftesbury Avenue
Pavilion, because it is the one silent house. Mr. Stuart
Davis is always on the look-out for something new.

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Londoners will be able to see The Lamp-posts of Paris, and
The Colour Symphony ,

Certain elements, in commercial scenarios, repeat like
onions. There is, at present, a tendency to make " theme
songs in plastic light " : short pictures, based on simple
stories, which are much in favour because Anthony Asquith,
or Widgey Newman^ said that only the treatment of a film
matters.

I hate artificial cinema respiration ; I hate waxworks, things
which look alive and are not. Ugh !

A little actress, Mireille de Severin, plays four leading
roles in The Lamp-posts. Her face has something of the
Mabel Poulton in it. She is a school girl who refuses to buy
flowers from herself as a starving outcast. In turn she
becomes the woman of luxury ^\ by blacking her eyelids
and wearing artificial pearls, w^ho furiously chases aw^av
herself as the flower girl, who, finally, manages to sell a
single bouquet to herself as a young, love-struck seamstress.

Such a complicated day, as one can well imagine, is too
exhausting for the poor thing.

Children skip with a rope tied to a lamp-post. Feet, of
the flower girl, tread the cobblestones of the night-deserted
streets. The neglected rope swinging on the lamp-post. An
orientation of the camera to give the view point of Mr. Moon.
Feet dangling lifelessly, shadow on the wall, flowers washed
down the gutter. . .

It is a theme song in light, the kind of thing Al Jolson
sings in the weepies, but it is presented seriously wath the
question, ''Is it cinema? " always in the mind of the
director. Mr. Potamkin could tell them about unity : theme

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and treatment must correspond. It is no use for the director
to be smart aleck when the storv demands a man of deep
insight.

Lamp-posts are supposed to link together the episodes, for
the somewhat childish reason that most of them take place
under a street light. When a character walks down a street
the film switches to the heads of lamp-posts, framed in an
iris, whizzing by very smoothly. Had the scenario been
conceived in a more poetical wav the director might have
shown us faces like moon-lit flowers, types, moods, the sea
on land : something too big for the stage as we know it.

If walls could speak ! The camera can make them, can
make lamp-posts tell of life, instead of singing four verses
of a sentimental ditty.

It is worth seeing. In due course, when it is presented,
I advise readers to look out for it, if only for the glimpses of
old Montmartre, and for the promise it gives that, one day,
someone will tell the storv which was hinted at by the lamp
lighter in Jannings' The Last Laugh,

The Colour Symphony is another film of promise. The
camera is more limited than we think, and capable of greater
things than we dream. It cannot make a sugar story con-
vincing, but it could have developed the secondary motif into
something impressive.

We have had visual rhyme (severely copyrighted), sound
imagery, counterpoint, and Kino Eye-wash ; isn't it time we
had colour innuendo? As a cult it needs prophets, severely
to copyright it, as well as a few smiles of encouragement
from our advanced amateurs, or, better still, a code of film
renter's grips and Wardour Street passwords.

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The Colour SymphoJiy puts all sorts of notions into one's
head : what the avant-garde can do with colour, w^hat ought
not to be done with colour, and what everyone is trying to
do with colour. If the literati do not approve of this little
film, when it is shown, I shall still keep my notions — possibly
keep them dark !

For years theatrical colours have tempted manv to play with
the idea of a film on the lines of this American effort. The
coloured sheets of gelatine, which the stage electrician slips
in front of the spot lights, create a whole world of the
artificial. Pure photography, as Francis Bruguiere always
said, is a matter of controlled light. The photographic
artist of to-day should be able to boast that his pictures are
his own, not a record of nature's own. Thus these theatrical
colours offer a chance to the cinematographer in particular,
to make something beyond the imitative. A world can be
suggested : from the surge of an angry mob to the collapse
of a child's gaudy toy.

Colour photography is sound photography. Colour music.
Everyone has heard of colour music, everyone has heard
colour. The scale of the musician parallels the colours of
the spectrum : some notes are ivory white, others flame ruby.

In the experiment, under review, there is a flow of
kaleidoscopic patterns. There is no cutting; in its place a
constant merging, melting, and splitting of figures. Prisms
are emploved, the patterns being symmetrical. The centre is
displaced, now to one side, now to another. A circular
basis can be found for all the compositions, even the
expanding stars seem to be formed from the overlapping of
four circles. Occasionally there is a sense of depth, while

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some of the groups have a whirhvind force, seeming to be
sucked into the central web. Towards the end of the picture
a shape, resembhng a Hghthouse in silhouette, makes
its appearance, and, in a strange \vay, radiates brilHantly
tinted curves.

What is so surprising, and important, is the dramatic
power of juxtaposed colours. A red that suddenly explodes,
a soft green infusing the screen after a wash of scarlet, black
stars that unfold from a sea of gold : all react on the spectator
in a definite, psychological manner. An audience can be
thrilled, soothed, startled, by a transient colour glimpse. A
chain of emotions could be inspired by points of luminous
shades, growing, converging, sinking back. So that an
author-artist could build up a situation from a crescendo of
light, colour and form.

There are clearly marked limits to the things which can
be done. In The Colour Symphony there are moments when
one is reminded of an animated drawing-room carpet, or a
w4shy-w^ashy imitation of Vogue, Severe eye-strain is caused
by the intense demands of following the figures of mauve,
vermilion, sapphire, lavender, all at the same time.

The field is a new one. Who will be in the vanguard with
colour innuendo ?

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

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SA TETE.
New Film by Jeax Epstein.

Mr. Epstein's trees planted along a low horizon. A
farmyard. Mr. Epstein has been looking at the stills of the
Ballade of a Duck. The old mother does not know what
is happening. The spectator does not know what is
happening. A church, as if to say, " Don't worry."

The hero, with his young lady, having his fortune told.
Told by Mr. Epstein and not the fakir. Suggestion of a
guillotine, of a love affair. Frances Dhelia at the fair,
holding down her skirts. Even if the camera does not know
what is happening the public must be occupied. Attraction.
The hero thinks of his girl's employer, rich employer at the
bank.

Telepathy : rather nice. The boy thinks of the old man,
who is shown going to his house. He reaches a decision as
the old man reaches the house.

The girl gives him money to pay for the swings and the
round-abouts.

The boy is arrested. The mother does not know why.
A cocoon of a film. One sees something; next day one sees
paper about the affair. So the mother tries to read the paper,
waiting for the trial. For the first time she reads in the paper
that her son is accused of murder of the wealthy banker.
Plastic interest in the inserts of the paper ; different sizes of
shots and movement. Epstein compositions of small figures
on the bench. One begins to know what is happening, one
begins to know Mr. Epstein.

Magnesium ribbon ; photograph of mother. The press

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knows what it wants, a good murder stor}'. Mr. Epstein is
doing his best. The rhythm is more assured.

Now that the spectator knows what is happening he begins
to impose himself on the fihii, to form a false idea. The
chauffeur who saw the boy entering the bank; the brother
who saw the boy near the director's room; the timid bov.

It all would be. more effective with sound, which, at the
moment, is dangerous, and there is a peculiar evolution of
film technique depending on film technique. Large close
ups jump to long shots in such a way that one feels Mr.
Epstein is thinking of the position of a trolly at the end of
a travelling shot. This makes smooth cuts for the audience
fed on America's moving cameras, but it is a tiresome
subterfuge for the critic.

The mother makes friends with the girl. Compare the
mothers making friends in Finis Terrae. Thev turn as the
door of the court-room opens; things are not going well with
the boy.

The Church. Villagers do not understand. Thev throw
stones at the mother's cottage.

Cigarettes ; boredom of slick brother who knows too much.

The characters begin to bore the spectator, who knows
this much too much, that the boy will get off in the end and
go away with the girl. He begins to tell himself stories about
them. The mother, in her bonnet, makes him hum. the
refrain, " Don't have any more, Mrs. More."

A cruel touch at the end; the village rejecting the mother.

Pudovkin would find all the moral lessons that Russian
films (please note, film critics) DEMAND.

OSWELL BlAKESTON.

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PEHOUA.

A New Negro Document.

Natives climbing onto a white boat : white men climbing
onto the black land. Why will they insist on the whites?
Are we not tired of them ? More than whites, a white story.
The new agent who is astonished at the civilisation of the
natives. I hope the negro people get some fun out of the
primitiveness of the whites.

When is a document not a document ? When it is a
French one. The natives are shown at their tasks, and the
silly little agent trots into the picture to watch them. I feel
as annoyed as if mv neighbour stuck his head, every few
minutes, into the beam of the projection apparatus.

There are some pretty magic rites, there are some lovely
heavy skies, some good dances. What does our hero do
when he gets to the native village? Does he try to vibrate
with the rites, skies, dances? He puts on a phonograph,
he reads an inane French comic paper.

The comedy with the little boys is either very charming
or very forced, it depends on the time of day, before or
after a good lunch.

Our hero wants a servant. He is married to a black girl.
Her black lover hopes to win her back. He becomes the
victim at the Feast of Flagellation, exposing himself to the
terrific blows. This is really exciting; a record of a
true ceremony carried out perfectly seriously. The actor was
beaten thoroughly for the sake of the avant-garde cinemas.
Interest is spoilt by shots of the white man watching.

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The white man leaves, in a native propelled chair. After
fetiches, trials by poison, the black girl is married again to
the black man. While her marriage drums beat she . . .
cries. Not even for purity, but for a white man's film (if
any one still remembers Michael Arlen).

O. B.

FOYLE FOR FILMS.

A man played a gramophone. Stopped playing. Went
behind the scenes to project The Magic of Boohs.

Pastoral books bring to you the magic of the country-side.
Books superimposed over meadows. Tales of the sea bring
to you adventure. Books superimposed over ships. Then,
all in one title, a reminder that there are essays, memoirs,
panegyrics, sermons, dramas, comedies, text-books, etcetera.
A super superimposed effect ? Cleverly loopholed by a view
of book shelves.

Sir Walter Scott talks to Dickens in Epping Forest.
(Somebody declares that Shelley is Harpo Marx). The
literati of yesterday decide to journey to the new building of
Messrs. Foyle, in Manette Street, and congratulate the
proprietors.

This is one of the most determined efforts to use films for
advertising. There are two doses of continuous projection,
in Foyle's private theatre, each day. The pity is that they
use an advertising film.

O. B.

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POE AS AN INSPIRATION FOR THE CINEMA.

Epstein began Usher in an almost conventional manner :
villagers gossiping in the inn, and the stranger who wants
to go to Usher. The villagers refuse, to a man, to act as
guide. Usher, in the world, but on the fringe of it. Not an
impossible, but a different castle.

The much vaunted amateur production of The Fall of the
House of Usher opens with overlapping shutters being with-
drawn to show the tiny figures under cardboard pillars.

The lady is dressed, in the American version, as a typical
vamp. She is very rude about her food : makes faces at it.

Optical trickery, with prisms, is not psychic atmosphere,
especially when the composition is sloppy.

O. B.

FROZEN ULRIC.

Frozen Justice. Lenore Ulric in her first talkie. The
vamp of Broadway. Theme song : Broadway, Broadway. . .
We went.

Dog packs pulling sleighs, and men pushing the sleighs
and dogs. It's a hard life in the North. Men are men, and
Lenore Ulric is the star. She waits for the Great Chief, her
husband, in a lace shawl. Frozen North. What," she
cries, is the use of being beautiful if there is no man to
see? " The audience is watching.

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Model of a ship collapses to rhythmic wind machines.
Escape, with the captain, to a town of low bars. Dance,
dance little lady. And she wants to go back to the Great
Chief : works herself into such a passion that she forgets she
is playing in a film and pulls too fiercely at a property drawer.
Her efforts to steady the furniture, without spoiling the take,
are as funny as the lady having difficulty with her music at
the Russian pierrots.

Husband asks the camera if he will ever again find his
wife? We'll see the producer about it.

Chase over the ice. Two characters point out how
dangerous it is. Two characters point out how the ice broke
in 1884 on such a day. Two characters make it all nice and
easy for the popular patrons.

Back in the town Louis Wolheim's clothes are soaked in
blood. The good-hearted prostitute dashes into the room,
and asks him if he is hurt.

Sound is used very cleverly in the playing of a phono-
graph. Deliberate distortion, the patent of Mr. Pudovkin,
is hinted at.

O. B.

THE GLITTERING SWORD.

This is — I am told — Mr. Ronald Gow's fifth film effort with
the Altrincham School boys. A week was spent among
them constructing and painting the sets, and a further three
weeks in the actual shooting of the scenes on the locale of

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a single hill just outside Dartmouth. Wigs and thirty of
the costumes were hired, the remaining 150 or so having been
made by the boys' relatives.

All this means nothing, of course, unless a film is the
outcome. Well, to use Air. Gow's ovvn words, The Glittering
Sword is neither a box-office nor an avant garde proposition.
But it would be interesting to school audiences and amateur
production societies, and worthy of a word in Close Up,

In the form of an allegorical legend, the film is a call to
youth in the future to decide for themselves upon either War
and World Powder or Peace, Bread and Life. But neither
the allegory nor the significance of the various symbols come
out with sufficient clarity and strength. The gamble for
souls betw^een Death and the Devil, should have been nearer
the beginning of the film. It would have made an arresting
opening scene.

Youth finds the silver sword, but w^hen the stupid populace
choose that it shall bring them Power through War, youth
casts it into the sea. This scene might, with advantage to
its conviction, have symbolised the future casting out
superstition and aged tradition, and choosing reason and
wisdom to guide its own strong right arm.

Mr. Gow should makes his puppets move with a greater
sense of rhythm, especially as he has to make up for the
natural inability of schoolboys to develop any degree of
characterisation.

Hay Chowl.

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BOOK REMEWS.

Filmgegner von Heutc, Filmjreunde von Morgeiu bv Hans
Richrer, published by H. Reckendorf. Berlin, S.W.4S,
Hedemannstrasse 48. Price, 7 RM. 50 Pf.

This bcHjk is particularlv valuable on account of its fine
illustrations. Richter's text is well considered but short,
and it is admirablv supplemented bv a great variety of photo-
graphs chosen from films that have brought new ideas to the
cinema.

Richter sees the salvation of the cinema through collective
work and the creation of a group system. Although the
workers from director to assistant camera-man have nor
eqiialh' important work, at least they should share the
responsibilit}- in part of its creation.

These questions are illustrated by stills from the best of the
advanced hlms, and there is much satisfaction to be derived
from an examination of the pictures.

The cjuestion of sound films is treated and Richter tries lo
show that the sound film does not need to repeat the faults of
the silent cinema, but that it should free itself as rapidlv as
possible from the danger of assimilation. The sound film
must establish its own laws, perhaps not yet even visualised,
and must use to the full its own methods. Will the com-
mercial world understand this point ?

The English translation of the title is Film O pponents
To-d.i\\ Flii: F':c}iiis o; T o ro\i: .

J. Levauer.

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RED LETTER DAY.

Three new German books : sensation for the London
cinephile.

Film Photos Wie Noch Nie is a most friendly book.
There is not a page, of the copious illustrations, which
assaults the eye. The patchwork grouping is just made for
slow gloating. One can find so many old friends : Yvette,
Emak Bakia, Expiation, and films with' the Nielsen, with the
Bergner, with THE Porten. The book approaches in form
to the film, rather than to the conventional film book.

Some of the pages are made up with a star's best roles,
other pages have Passion, Grace, or The Happy End as
title if not justification. Anna May Wong found her way
onto the Grace page !

Hans Richter's Filmgegner von Heute, Filmfreunde von
Morgen is a serious w^ork, with a message : a message to
cinemagoers to squeal for better films. Richter begins his
work by showing that film is taken on emulsion coated
celluloid. By excerpts he shows how motion can be speeded
up, retarded, reversed, burlesqued. He shows the soft focus
and the out of focus, distortion, different ways of moving
the camera, and so forth. To those who are still groping
it is essential. The montage, and cross cutting is explained
by morsels of film. There is an explicit diagram revealing
how the expression, of a young man, appears to change as
he is juxtaposed to a plate, a dead man, and a nude woman.
Detail, rhythm, and motion are all demonstrated in the

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montage way. There are sections devoted to : actualities
and educational pictures, visual metaphors, visual wit, Hans
Richter, film poetry, and what has been achieved in the past.

Werner Graff, in Es Kommt der Neue Fotograf, wants to
get still photographic apparatus modified to suit modern
requirements. He takes the old laws and proves them
worthless. You must not light the hands of a sitter more
strongly than the face, you must not have a line parallel to
the border of a print, you must not have the horizon in the
middle of the picture, you must not have a barren fore-
ground, meeting points of thirds are the strong positions, the
head of a model must be in the middle of the picture, the
photographer must not cast his own shadow. . . All must-
nots, to Werner Graff, are equally absurd. Attention is
paid to possibilities of lighting-out a nose, of taking pictures
wnth beams of light shining into the lens, of magnifying
small sections of an object to bring out the texture of the
whole. Above everything the shape of the print, and the
width of the white border, is proved to be a vital considera-
tion : a subject which is completely neglected in England.

OSWELL BlAKESTOX.

Beyond This Point, bv Sieveking and Bruguiere.
Duckworth. 15^.

One of those books that seem rich in possibility from the
moment vou see it. The publisher tells us it is an experiment

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in an entirely new form. The text is inseparable from the
photographs, each are integral parts of the other. This
might inspire mistrust if the format were not so assuredly
attractive. One glimpse inside will bring vou to the
Bruguiere photographs that touch all that the unconscious

contains, thrilling abstractions how proud you

are of

Cannot I Cannot ! Cannot !
Then we know that all is well, we are not coveting " fairy
gold text and photographs are indeed one, and a new layer
of consciousness is indeed lifted. A mysterious, enchanted
vision has risen like a sun. . . . And all our yesterdays
have

lighted fools

There are rare pages, plunging a straight finger through
the infinite. It might have been such a chi-chi book, but
it " comes off ". Three fundamental crises in human
experience — Death, Jealousv and Ruin. Essentiallv a book
to be taken up at odd quiet moments, otherwise sombre
subjectivity will tire a shaken mind. Because the vision is
distinguished, inevitably there are passages that in contrast
seem laboured or trite. " The earth spins on through space,
and time, unflagging. .

Well, our concern is the cinematic angle. If Sieveking
and Bruguiere have not been able to gladden the heart, to
pour out thought, to enrich, the fault lies not with them,
but with the graceless cinephile.

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RE-APPEARANCE OF JEANNE NEY.

The book of Ilya Ehrenbourg which gave its name to one
of the most discussed, most lauded films ever made. The
Love of Jeanne Ney, has now been pubhshed by Messrs.
Peter Davies Ltd., in what appears to be an excellent trans-
lation from the Russian .

It is nearly a year since the film had its release (in restricted
form, of course). The issue of the book, then, at this time
is happily somewhat belated, happily, because an earlier
publication, whether prior to or concurrently with the exhi-
bition of the film, would doubtless have given rise to futile
questions as to the extent to which adaptation is morally
permissible.

The film's the thing, and if it suits the film to turn the
book inside out, there is no ground for complaint. If weary
critics come to the film carrying with them the associations
derived from the book, that is their misfortune.

The only valid question, apart from that relating to the
motives (which are always suspect) for alteration or trans-
formation, is surely w^hether the film has lost or gained in the
result.

There need be little hesitation in recommending this
astonishing book which can perfectly w^ell stand alone, with-
out looking for any reflected glory from Pabst's piece. For
that reason alone, perhaps astonishing '' would be an apt
expression.

Perhaps it is not altogether fortunate that Henning, when
he fell in love with Jeanne Ney, was not like Andrew^ a
married man, or responsible for the shot which closed the

534

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career of Jeanne's father. Those particular conflicts and
their solution were within the implications of the whole film,
and if the omission of any reference to the marriage was the
director's own choice, the other alteration may well have been
impelled by a different line of argument. In Payidora's Box
(not the French travesty the " Oeuvre moralisatrice qui
pourrait s'intituler le Rachat d'une Ame ") Lulu is the
murderer of her lover's father, so there is a parallel (and
doubtless a moral) to be found there.

The film realisation of the characters common to book and
film shows the most penetrating and almost incredible in-
sight, and it was cleverer, perhaps, of Pabst to translate
Jeanne into Jehanne, Andrew into Henning, and above all to
create Rasp-Halibieff, than to convey in terms of the screen
the Paris of the Rue iMorillon and the Rue Thiboumery,
where a combination of smells of smoke, oil and urine passes
for fresh air, and the hotel in the Rue Odessa, where they
don't ask about your papers.

The scene to which Mr. Macpherson refers in his article in
Close Up (Dec. 1927) of the (Bourgeois) wedding debauch,
is not in the book, and possibly may have compensated for
the impossibility of commenting on the love of Jeanne and
Andrew, by reference to the incidents in the remaining 17
rooms of that infamous hotel.

The so-called happy ending was an improvement on the
story in which Jeanne has to submit to the insults of Halibieff
while Andrew is executed for the murder. Horror is piled
on horror, and finally loses its effect.

The film avoided this (probably it had no choice in the

535

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matter) and the emotional value of the last scene was quite
negative.

It should be emiphasised that while the film was in very
many respects a realisation of the book, it remained an in-
tensely individual creation ; perhaps as much' because the
director found the material on which he had to work
peculiarly adapted to his ideas as on account of the difference
in the medium.

Margot's dramatic visit to the blind girl is described on
page 130 : ''At the door stood the heroine of the finest film
in the world, the reckless Margot, who was a cocaine addict
Well, actually Edith Jehanne was the heroine, still

HOLLYWOOD'S IDEA OF REVUE.

Th'e}^ get Maurice Chevalier out to Hollywood, they put
him in a film and they find that the only way in which they
can show people his stuff is to let him sing his songs at a
rehearsal which takes place during the film. They get
Sophie Tucker and they put her into a masculined Al Jolson
film. Universal get Paul Whiteman and find they can't put
him in any film .... but they go on paying him a salary
just the same.

Then Metro-Goldwyn, bless their little hearts, decide to
make a revue. Much simpler. No need to bother about a
story. Just a lot of people doing their stuff, and probably
cheap in the long run (I am guessing here) because no one

536

CLOSE UP

artist does very much. Anywav the public flocks to see
Bessie Love, Charles King (do thev ?), ^larie Dressier,
Marion Davies, Joan Crawford, Gilbert, Lionel Barrymore,
L'kulele Ike, and so on. But is it a revue? No, sir I They
don't know what a revue is. Thev get a lot of turns, and
they use two stars to introduce them, and they put the whole
lot behind footlights and give us a film^ed stage-show, but it
isn't a revue. How could it be?

There's no focus, no connecting link. Nothing but a lot
of turns. Some of them are good. Some bad. Few of them
are fresh or high-spirited. Gags awful. Still, Marie
Dressier is great when she first comes on as the Queen,
bowing. This is because she is a screen actress. But her
lines are dreadful. And an Edwardian trio she does with
Moran and Love is like a London freak party with the
inhibitions left out. The chorus is dull, not used filmically
at all, and dressed . . . well, dressed about as right for revue
as Hollywood's smart women are well-dressed. Exaggerated
in the wrong places and for the rest, we hope this is what's
done. A nice mock-magic turn ; an amusing Keaton cross-
dressed snake charming dance with a string of sausages ;
some good tunes. A neat dance by Love. What else?
Nagel looking pretty throughout, does that count?

For the rest, Craw^ford not nearly as snapped up as in her
dancing films. Looks as though' she'd reduced too hurriedly.
Davies a flop . . . where are her impertinations, and no
chance for Norma Shearer to be slick. A Ballet of Jewels
number about as new as the earliest Folies Bergere.

Lavishly staged " but not a bit interesting or luscious
to look at. What we want in film revues is revue made by

537

CLOSE LP

the camera. Twenty-five stars are just odd bits, to be welded
into patterns by the camera. There is no welding here, and
there aren't any patterns. The nearest attempt at unity is
having the turns introduced. I ask you. But we DID have
patterns and roving camera and syncopated light hinted at in
Movietone Follies^ and we had Stepin Fetchit, who was the
real focus. It's a pity, because they are interesting people,
and if they'd built them up round Soph, who's a centre if ever
there was one, what you might call a street refuge . . . well,
round her, there might have been a pretty pattern of whirling
lights and stars and songs. But, as I say, they put her in
mother-love and they pour twenty-five stars on to a studio

floor and hope they've got a revue. Whereas revue is

something much more intricate and satisfying. Not that
The Holly^^ood Revue isn't fun, but it's so disappointing
and silly.

R. H.

HOLLYWOOD NOTES.

Madame Satan will be Cecil de ]\Iille's next production.
Differing radically from anything De^Iille has heretofore
done in films, this to be a musical comedy. This type of
production, however, will be neither an experiment nor a
noveltv for him, as in his pre-cinema days he was identified
with musical stage shows borh as an actor and a producer.
Jeanie ]\Iacpherson is credited with the authorship of the story

538

CLOSE UP

of Madame Sataiiy with the dialogue to be written by someone

else, and the music to be written by still another somebody.

* * *

Universal was the pioneer company to exhibit talking
pictures on trans-oceanic liners, and now, keeping step with
progress, it is showing its pictures on trans-continental air-
planes. For this purpose 16mm. film is used in conjunction
with a Duograph projector weighing but nine pounds and
operated by a dry-cell battery. A special daylight screen
is also part of the equipment, thus making it unnecessary to
darken the cabin for the showing of the films.

^i^ *

Hold Everything, a forthcoming Warner Brothers' all-
colour vitaphone film, features Georges Carpentier, the
popular French prize fighter. Naturally, the story of the
picture revolves around a prize fight, in which, also naturally,
Carpentier proves the hero. The ringside set required
nearly the entire space of one of the large sound stages, while
nearly a thousand extra were employed as spectators of the
fistic battle between the hero and his antagonist, Tony
Stabenau.

* * -5^

Lillian Gish, who is completing her first talking picture,
an adaptation of Molnar's The Swan^ shares with Charlie
Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks, the
distinction of averaging but one picture a year. In these
swift moving days of change and shifting public taste, this
distinction carries with it a marked popular tribute of esteem
and loyalty. It remains to be seen, however, what the
public's reaction will be to Miss Gish's forthcoming role —

539

CLOSE UP

an ultra-fashionable worldly young princess, as contrasted

with her heretofore wistful and demure characterizations.

* ^ *

The Lone Star Ranger, a Fox movietone, is the first old-
time " Western " to be produced for the talking screen. It
features George O'Brien and Sue Carol, against a back-
ground of three-thousand extras and the wilds of Arizona.
If it meets with popular approval, it will undoubtedlv
signalize the return of the Western,'' which for the past
few years has been conspicuous by its absence from the
screen. Tom Mix, who for nearly two decades was the
leading hero of this type of cinema drama, has been giving
exhibitions in a traveling circus since the decadence of the
Wild West picture ; and it is now not improbable, despite
his fifty years, that he may again be seen on the screen in his
dare-devil exploits.

* * *

Broadway Vagabond is the title selected for United Artists
first musical comedy. A novel feature of its preparation was
the use of skeleton sets for rehearsals. As the term indicates,
the sets, for purposes of rehearsal, were merely outlined on the
various stages ; thus avoiding the expense of building and
maintaining the actual sets ahead of production, while at
the same time familiarizing the players with the layout of the
scenes. Among the featured players in this film is Juliette
Compton, well-known in England for her work on the
London stage and in British made pictures. The director
is Ted Sloman, who a few years ago attracted international

notice by his masterly directing of His People.

^ ^ ^

540

CLOSE UP

Among recent technical improvements perfected at the
Paramount-Lasky studios is a device for eliminating the
noise of arc-lights, thus making possible their use in the
production of talking pictures. Since the advent of sound,
carbon arc-lamps have been discarded in favour of in-
candescents, because of the humming and high-pitched
whistle of the arcs. Their photographic value, however, is
much higher than the others ; and the new soUnd-deadening
device will, therefore, now not onlv again permit their use,
but will also save the threatened scrapping of a vast and
expensive equipment. Besides this invention, there has also
been brought to perfection a high-speed colour-photography
process, by which the most rapid motions can be successfully
photographed. This new process is being put to its first
practical use in a picture now under way at the studio —
Pointed Heels.

* * *

Warner Brothers are preparing to produce various
language versions of many of their one and tAvo-reel pictures.
Already, by way of preliminary experiment, they have made
for the French market Dans Culo Americain, and for the
German market Echtiger Americkaner. Others will follow
in Spanish and the various Scandinavian languages, and are
intended for showing not only in the countries indicated but
also in the various foreign settlements of America.

Lasky-Paramount are following suit to the extent of
producing two language versions of Maurice Chevalier's
new picture, The Big Pond — one to be in English and the
other in French.

^ ^ ^

541

CLOSE UP

Following the acquisition of theatres throughout the
country by the leading Hollywood producers, as a develop-
ment of the cinema business, the producing of stage plavs
promises to be the next step in the expanding of Hollywood's
activities. As a start in this direction ]^I-G-]\I have entered
into a deal with Edgar Selwyn, one of America's leading-
theatrical producers, to put on plays in New York. The now
close relationship between the stage and the talking screen
makes this move a natural one, and if it should prove
successful will give the Hollywood producers the combined
profits of stage and screen plays, for the ultimate purpose is,
of course, to adapt each theatrical production to the screen
after it has had its stage run.

C. H.

Silberkonder iiher Feuerland.

A film by Gunther Pliischow.

This film is an extremely interesting document and should
be popular, especially with children, for it is a real adventure
story in pictures, of a trip made from Germany south across
the Line in a sailing boat, down to Brazil (where there is a
sequence showing the wild tribes shooting with bows and
arrows) from there to Patagonia, das Feuerland, (Tierra del
Fuego). The ship is shown at anchor in a fjord full of drift
ice and penguins, where glaciers and mountains rise above

542

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the trees, and flowers. A reel follows of mysterious land-
scapes taken from the air, that seem to belong to a lunar
or undiscovered continent, very bleak and wild. The flight
and landing of the aeroplane have not lost their adventurous
quality in the photographs.

The film ends with wind, the rounding of Cape Horn,
riding across grass, sea elephants off the coasts of Chile, and
guanacoes hiding behind bushes. To most people the
southern edge of the South American continent is a blank.
This picture shows that blank to be a land of storms and
perilous, almost Antarctic landscapes. The photography is
excellent. It is certainly (in spite of an occasional over-
emphasis on the nationalistic side) one of the best travel films
shown this vear.

The White Hell of Piz Palu..

A Sokal-Film production for Aafa-Sonderverleih.

Directed by Dr. Arnold Fanck and G. W. Pabst.

Photographed by Sepp Allgeier, Rich. Angst,
Hans Sneeberger.

Sets by Erno Metzner.

Featuring Gustav Diessl, Leni Riefenstahl,
Ernst Peterson.

" If people are such fools as to go climbing impossible
heights and get into difficulties, that is their own look out."

543

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A common objection, this, to the fihii of mountaineering.
Yet it is something of the same spirit that sent Hannibal over
the Alps, that sent out the ^Mayflower, indeed, that mapped
the world. If man had never set foot on a hill, most certainly
much' of the world would be uninhabited. To-dav, it is true,
climbing is rarely associated with discovery, but that it has
its old appeal is proved by the thousands who yearly scale
the summits — not necessarily fools, but adventurers. Those
who admit the lure of the sea might well realise that moun-
tains have their call. If a pleasure-boat goes down we do not
say if people are such fools as to go on a boat for nothing-
better than pleasure, that is their own look out The
chances of accident have to be taken. Death comes more
frequently to the careful town-dweller walking in the streets.
Therefore, a film that concerns the rescue of some perfectly
accomplished climbers, who fall into mischance, is not a film
dealing with " fools " and their selfishness, but as sym-
bolically pertinent as any story of human conflict and
alliance.

Some will accept this idea instinctively. Others will never
accept it. It will be their loss, in this instance, at least, for
here, as never before, is the living spirit of the mountains,
vivid, rarified, terrifying and lovely. Other mountain films
we have had, but we have never had mountains — almost
personifiable, things of wild and free moods, forever
changing. The glorious rush of avalanches punctuating
silence, warnings of greater, m.ore terrible torrents. Snow
blown up in a bright fringe on the ridges. Sun, cloud, the
never ending revelations of light. Nobody who loves the
hills could fail to be held by this tribute to their splendour.

544

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For the hero Diessl, the " Alleinganger — with a com-
manding sullen beauty, and heroic attributes. For the
heroine, Leni Riefenstahl, renewed and unexpectedly fresh,
unexpectedly charming. A flowing free rhythm, breath-
catching beauty, genuine alarm. Not blatant or manu-
factured, but sensed with authenticity. The star remains the
mountains. No greater success has been accorded to a
German film.

Impressed by The Mercury Press Ltd., London, Ilford and Chelmsford.

The Avenue Pavilion

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to the problems of purely amateur cinematography

Editor: Andor Kraszna-Krausz, Berlin
Publisher: Wilhelm Knapp, Halle/Saale, Muhlweg 19

Subscription 2.25 R.M. quarterly
Specimen number free on request

A NEW POOL BOOK

EXTRA PASSENGER

By -OswELL Blakeston.
Author of Through a Yellow Glass.

Is a book about cinema people and film studios.

The Cinema says —

The critic who is an artist is a rarity. Mr.
Blakeston is both. And that is no small matter
for which to be thankful."

An ideal, inexpensive Christmas gift, distinguished to
give, and a compliment to a distinguished person.

POOLi 24 Devonshire Street^ London^ WX.l

Price 7 shillings and 6 pence

Postage 6 pence extra.

Order from your bookseller or direct from

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